Confused....is this normal

[Anna85]

My Ds recently diagnosed with ASD is sensitive to come noises and not others..is this normal.

If we are in the car driving along we will most times ask me to turn it down yet he has just turned the music up in his bedroom really loudly which didnt seem to bother him!!

Is it normal to react to noise sometimes and not others??

My son, with asd, had hypersensitive and distorted hearing. When we saw his audiogram it was a shocking mess of zig zag lines.

Some frequencies hurt his ears - while for other frequencies he had hearing loss.

We were lucky enough to be able to afford auditory integration therapy at the sound learning centre in London. This has vastly improved his hearing.

don't know about ASD
but I can kind of understand it as in a car you are in a confined space with other sensory things going on, so maybe that is what he doesn't like.

Another possibility - that it's not so much sensitivity in the sense of tolerance, as interruptability, how much "notice" you take of the input. I know you get that with ADHD and there's some overlap; it's possible that he is over-aware of sound input so an annoying radio station is doubly annoying and your own enjoyable music is doubly enjoyable.

Its strange as for example he loves lawn mowers but even before they start his fingers are in his ears, but then once it starts he gets over excited about it!!! xx

My DS asd too, is also sensitive to certain noises, lawnmovers, hoover, handdryers, loo flush, even cars and lorries going past us when we are walking somedays, music too to a certain extent,... but some days seem worse than others, and sometimes he doesn't seem that bothered and seems to cope, yet at other times he will cover his ears or stick his fingers in his ears at the slightest bit of noise and get quite upset.

genie - my son is exactly like that. And odd things sometimes, like in a lift recently there was a light (flourescent?) that was humming and it upset him quite a bit. Hand dryers absolutely terrify him and he jumps when the loo flushes. But yet he cannot seem to go to sleep without one of his two familiar cd's playing in his room (not very loud, just playing). I often wonder if it helps him tune out other noises that keep him from sleeping.