"#TheDress Reveals Something Pretty Profound About Autism"

"The range of autism-related sensory issues is large. Some people, such as Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, have trouble with certain textures. “Velvet, in particular, I find very difficult to touch,” he told BuzzFeed News. Others cower at high-pitched noises, he added, or lights that emit low-level hums that most people don’t notice. Yet others have issues with smells and tastes.

“I tend to see lots and lots of things but cannot distinguish those things without spending actual time building them actively in my brain,” Karla Fisher, who runs a popular Facebook page about autism, told BuzzFeed News. “I have to focus on an area and wait until my eyes can actually make sense of that small area, and then I can move on. It isn’t about colors or not colors. It is rather about dress or not dress.”

Last night’s dress incident, Ne’eman said, is “a really good way of acknowledging that people see things differently, perceive things differently, and one way is not necessarily superior to the other.”"

http://www.buzzfeed.com/virginiahughes/thedress-reveals-something-pretty-profound-about-autism#.qnK2Q8P3X

I am actually really into the dress - I don't think it's a purely frivolous internet distraction, because it's going to enable all of these metaphors. It was such a great, communal experience of neuroscience, and also profound naturally-occurring differences in perspective. And, instead of trying to debate our way toward some random empirical truth (lets be real, no one actually cares about the exact color of a frankly ugly dress they don't own), we described our perspectives to each other and accepted that other people were having fundamentally different experiences and explored that wider question of where the difference comes from and what it means and learned from each other.