The Reason I jump

I'm reading a book called The Reason I Jump, written by an autistic, Japanese child by the name of Naoki Higishida, about what it is like to be autistic. 

The introduction contains these paragraphs:

"Now your mind is a room where twenty radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music. The radios have no off-switches or volume controls, the room you’re in has no door or window, and relief will come only when you’re too exhausted to stay awake. 

"To make matters worse, another hitherto unrecognized editor has just quit without notice -your editor of the senses. Suddenly sensory input from your environment is flooding in too, unfiltered in quality and overwhelming in quantity. Colours and patterns swim and clamour for your attention. 

The fabric conditioner in your sweater smells as strong as air-freshener fired up your nostrils. Your comfy jeans are now as scratchy as steel wool. Your vestibular and proprioceptive senses are also out of kilter, so the floor keeps tilting like a ferry in heavy seas, and you’re no longer sure where your hands and feet are in relation to the rest of you. You can feel the plates of your skull, plus your facial muscles and your jaw: your head feels trapped inside a motorbike helmet three sizes too small which may or may not explain why the airconditioner is as deafening as an electric drill, but your father who’s right here in front of you sounds as if he’s speaking to you from a cell-phone, on a train going through lots of short tunnels, in fluent Cantonese. 

"You are no longer able to comprehend your mother-tongue, or any tongue: from now on all languages will be foreign languages. Even your sense of time has gone, rendering you unable to distinguish between a minute and an hour, _ as if you’ve been entombed in an Emily Dickinson poem about eternity, or locked into a time-bending SF film. Poems and films, however, come to an end, whereas this is your new ongoing reality. Autism is a lifelong condition."

Thus autism is, essentially, stimulus overload and the inability to focus. Just think about the implications for creating sci-fi, sentient robots. Without this mysterious, but crucial 'editor' to filter out, but yet continuously monitor unnecessary stimuli in the background, they would be autistic.

Facial recognition software performs this function, but only in one specific, very narrow area. The programming implications for a sentient android would be enormous.