“Language input. One type of language-input problem is not being able to hear hard-consonant sounds. When I was a child, I had difficulty differentiating hard-consonant sounds. To me, cat, hat, and pat sounded the same, because those consonants are quick. They’re spoken fast. I had to figure out which was which by thinking about what word made sense in a particular context. This description certainly fits the “World Changing Too Fast” article’s hypothesis that I discussed earlier. The other type of language-input problem is hearing the words but not being able to connect meaning to them, a syndrome that Donna Williams calls being “meaning blind.” Language output. I describe this problem as “a big stutter.” As a child, I could understand the words that people spoke slowly but I could not get my speech out. The solution my speech therapist proposed was the same one suggested in the “World Changing Too Fast” paper: Slow down. Attention-shifting slowness. Once a sound has my attention, I have trouble letting go and moving on to the next sound. If a mobile phone rings during one of my talks, it totally disrupts my train of thought; it grabs my attention, and my ability to shift back is slower than most people’s. Hypersensitivity to sound. The Internet is full of autistics’ testimonials to the problem of loud and sudden sounds of all sorts—balloons, sirens, fireworks. But some of the problematic sounds are the kind that you would think would be more mundane: “I can’t tolerate the sound of noodles being stirred (that horrid squishy sound).” Sometimes, though, hypersensitivity involves not a specific sound but a wealth of sounds: “You may have to ask the guy talking to you to repeat himself a few times because you were trying to get past the cars going by, the dog barking three blocks away, and the bug that buzzed past your ear.”