"Intense world"

The idea that some autistic behavior is due to hypersensitivity is a little older than the story suggests. Youngest Daughter had "Auditory Training", which seemed to help for a while, but then after a couple of weeks there was no further improvement. (The music in the headphones had random glitches, with the intention of desensitizing the hearer to noise.)

I've met more people on the autism spectrum than average, and am comfortable with the notion that there are many causes--there are certainly many presentations. The causes might hit the same general machinery, though.

If the thesis above is correct, and autistic children have sensory overload with consequent fear and defensive behaviors, then it might, as they also suggest, be possible to reduce its severity with very early intervention. Except that another study suggests that it is hard to distinguish it before about 3 months.

A couple of things don't seem to quite fit their model, though. One is the deficit in "cognitive empathy" (not "affective"--autistic children do like people):

In a now famous experiment, children watched two puppets, “Sally” and “Anne.” Sally has a marble, which she places in a basket and then leaves. While she’s gone, Anne moves Sally’s marble into a box. By age four or five, normal children can predict that Sally will look for the marble in the basket first because she doesn’t know that Anne moved it. But until they are much older, most autistic children say that Sally will look in the box because they know it’s there. While typical children automatically adopt Sally’s point of view and know she was out of the room when Anne hid the marble, autistic children have much more difficulty thinking this way.

The other is: if life is so overwhelming, how can they maintain focus so well? I suppose if it is life or death to learn to focus, you do.