Researchers Discover Missing Link Between Touch Sensation And Social Difficulties Within Autism Spectrum Disorder

Persons with autism might encounter struggles identifying touch sensations in the acts of other people. This finding is based on the study conducted in the novel research center EXPLORA in Ghent University, led by Prof. & Dr. Marcel Brass, Prof. & Dr. Roeljian Wiersema and Eliane Deschrijver.

Adults and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be either under sensitive or oversensitive to temperature, surrounding, noise or light, according to Autism Research Institute. Their five senses absorb either too little or too much information from the environments around them.

Various reports and articles in the past have reported the linkage of the roughness of everyday social challenges of persons with ASD to their tactile sensitivity. In order to find out why is this so, researchers from Ghent University studied how brains of persons with and without autism utilized their own sensory touch to know tactile feelings in the acts of other people.

"We think that the human brain uses the own sense of touch to distinguish one's self from others," Dr. Marcel Brass said, as per Science Daily. 

The study found out that the brains of persons without autism registered faster when a touch feeling doesn't relate to the own touch than persons with autism. Thus, Brass stressed human brain can effectively understand others by signaling tactile sensations that do not correspond to the own sense of touch.

Overall, the findings of the research show that the human brain activity of people with autism is not the same of that people without autism while dealing with sense of touch. These findings, according to Dr. Roeljian Wiersema, can mainly lead to a much better knowledge of the complex disorder and of related difficulties. Moreover, Eliane Deschrijver concluded that the findings of the research can produce a crucial and novel connection between social difficulties and sensory in people with ASD.