I hear everything, aaaand it goes in and I can fathom most of the things going in even at the most inappropriate times...
During sexy times with the wife I hear a floorboard creak and it can put me off entirely. Was it the house settling. A burglar!??!! Maybe the dog, it's the dog. No, the dogs are in the living room. BURGLAR. No, it's just a creak. What was I doing again.
During my mother's funeral after her doing of a horrible bout of cancer and I'm devastated about it...but I hear a bird tweet outside and I am now thinking about which bird it was and why it was tweeting.
At the cinema and the guy 5 rows back opens up a packet of m&m's and I'm more totally taken out of the movie that I was engrossed in.
Middle of a conversation with the wife in a pub and that table over there are taking about their upcoming holiday, whilst that table over there can't work out how to use the salt and pepper mills...no, sorry, they've worked it out. No, he's got it upside down. Now the lids feel off. What was you saying, dear?
No idea if it's ADHD or I'm just (un?)lucky to have an overhearing superpower.
AuDHD here. I also have very little filter for incoming noises. I suspect it's an auditory processing issue.
My "cocktail party" effect is weak, I sometimes struggle to hear words properly through phone calls (which is a big part of why I don't like making them), and if a show or movie doesn't have captions on I'll probably miss a lot of dialogue. I've had plenty of people ask, "Are you deaf?" or tell me to get my hearing checked when I ask them to repeat themselves, despite every hearing test I've ever taken showing that my hearing is better than average. It's not my ears that struggle, it's my brain's ability to filter/process/prioritize sounds that's unusual.
At the same time, I'm distracted by all sorts of details. I had an ex once remark that when people spoke a language he didn't understand, he found it easier to tune out. I thought that absurd; if anything my brain becomes even more distracted by foreign languages. I still detect (and can recreate) novel language sounds, even though linguists and brain-researchers claim I should've lost the ability to do that decades ago.
I wish I could get a brain scan when listening to sounds and compare the results to scans of other people. I can't help but think it would shed light on a lot of life-long issues and peculiarities.
Opposite here. Though I am not diagnosed.
I hear everything, aaaand it goes in and I can fathom most of the things going in even at the most inappropriate times...
During sexy times with the wife I hear a floorboard creak and it can put me off entirely. Was it the house settling. A burglar!??!! Maybe the dog, it's the dog. No, the dogs are in the living room. BURGLAR. No, it's just a creak. What was I doing again.
During my mother's funeral after her doing of a horrible bout of cancer and I'm devastated about it...but I hear a bird tweet outside and I am now thinking about which bird it was and why it was tweeting.
At the cinema and the guy 5 rows back opens up a packet of m&m's and I'm more totally taken out of the movie that I was engrossed in.
Middle of a conversation with the wife in a pub and that table over there are taking about their upcoming holiday, whilst that table over there can't work out how to use the salt and pepper mills...no, sorry, they've worked it out. No, he's got it upside down. Now the lids feel off. What was you saying, dear?
No idea if it's ADHD or I'm just (un?)lucky to have an overhearing superpower.
AuDHD here. I also have very little filter for incoming noises. I suspect it's an auditory processing issue.
My "cocktail party" effect is weak, I sometimes struggle to hear words properly through phone calls (which is a big part of why I don't like making them), and if a show or movie doesn't have captions on I'll probably miss a lot of dialogue. I've had plenty of people ask, "Are you deaf?" or tell me to get my hearing checked when I ask them to repeat themselves, despite every hearing test I've ever taken showing that my hearing is better than average. It's not my ears that struggle, it's my brain's ability to filter/process/prioritize sounds that's unusual.
At the same time, I'm distracted by all sorts of details. I had an ex once remark that when people spoke a language he didn't understand, he found it easier to tune out. I thought that absurd; if anything my brain becomes even more distracted by foreign languages. I still detect (and can recreate) novel language sounds, even though linguists and brain-researchers claim I should've lost the ability to do that decades ago.
I wish I could get a brain scan when listening to sounds and compare the results to scans of other people. I can't help but think it would shed light on a lot of life-long issues and peculiarities.