Slow aural processing

[Mannify]

I don't know where to start with this, because its effects are so pervasive. For example, I love languages, and although I can read, write and speak a language well, I struggle immensely with listening and understanding it. So, for one French mock GCSE exam when I was a kid, I literally got A+ for a writing test, and an E for the listening one.

 

I find it very hard to follow oral directions, particularly spatial directions, because I don't have much of a sense of direction, anyway. In a shop, though, I can tend to appear 'not with it' in situations where the assistant is directing me how to order something, or some other such process. All's well if things are written down, or I can write it down. Otherwise I annoy people with my slowness.

 

Mum used to get frustrated with me when she told me to do such and such, because I wouldn't respond immediately, but I was still processing the message! She still gets miffed when she asks me something, because in the time it takes me to process the question, she's already saying, 'answer me!'. I think the problem there is that my processing slows further if I feel pressured.

 

Even if my children start crying because they've hurt themselves, there is a delay between hearing and responding. I don't think it's a delay which will hurt them psychologically through my non-response, but it does illustrate the point.

 

I'll leave it there, but I bet I'll find other things to add as the day progresses.

Edited November 12, 2012 by Mannify

[raydon]

Even if my children start crying because they've hurt themselves, there is a delay between hearing and responding. I don't think it's a delay which will hurt them psychologically through my non-response, but it does illustrate the point.

 

That's interesting, so it isn't just words you are slow to react to, it's any sound even as emotive as a child's cry?

 

I have difficulty in understanding speech when there is any other noise or music. The words just blend into the overall sound and cease to be words, they just become part of the mix. Within that mix I can identify and follow individual components, notice the dynamics, whether they are in tune, in sync, etc, but can gain no meaning at a language level. The overall sound can affect me emotionally though.

 

If I am listening to single person, then I have no problems understanding the words.

Edited November 12, 2012 by raydon

[Mannify]

Yep, if someone came up to me and demanded, 'What's your name?', there would be several seconds within which I would genuinely not know what is my name. I understand the words, but I can be unusually slow to process them, particularly if they form instructions or directions.

 

One question which always has me non-plussed is, 'Did you have a nice time yesterday?', because even if it was something highly significant like a wedding, I find it hard to dredge up what happened yesterday quickly enough to respond in a socially typical way, and end up looking really slow, which in fact I am. That is partly to do with aural processing, but also because my long term memory for events is more efficient than my short-term memory.

[robert7111a]

Hi Mannify

 

Google "Auditory Processing Disorder".

 

This includes a delay in processing live speech and is made worse in noisy situations

[smileyK]

have you heard of APD auditory Processing Disorder??? this could be the cause of slow processing of sound/noise i'm the same delayed in hearing words etc especially in busy noisy loud environment it is like i'm tone deaf or i mishear the word as something similiar which can be embarrassing as people think being rude not hearing them right or at all! i would research and look into information further?!

 

hope this information helps anyways! :

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

 

XKLX

[Sally44]

Yes auditory processing disorder. I have it and so does my son and also my older brother.

 

There is a website for UK organisation. I'll find it and post the link. Are you dyslexic??

 

It affects everyone differently. I often appear deaf because I simply do not hear or process anything. Usually I start to home in on a voice or sound after someone has called my name loudly, probably three or four times!

 

I find it very hard to process information if there are a number of different sound sources. So in a nightclub my 'ears' seem in a trance to the music and I literally will not be able to hear or talk with anyone because I will not hear what they say, or if I hear it I cannot process it because the beat of the music overwrites what they are saying.

 

In crowded rooms, for example in a cafe, my ears will home in on different words being said by different people on different tables. So I just get a mish mash of words and sounds. I find it very hard to concentrate to try to listen to what someone maybe saying to me.

 

Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to process the meaning of what someone has said to me. That maybe a single word or the whole sentence, but generally I am okay.

[Sally44]

Here's the link http://www.apduk.org.uk/

[Mannify]

Thanks for your replies, all! Yes, I'll look into APD. Yes, it's better once in conversation, having tuned in properly, althoguh I'm still pretty useless at mental maths and quizzes, even having tuned in. I simply have to have something visual to work things out, although, I think that's a slightly different issue. Oral directions are lost on me almost entirely. So I guess there are two issues - auditory processing and the ability to retain and act on oral instruction. Both are not great for me.

[Mannify]

Sorry Sally, I didn't answer your question. No, I'm not dyslexic.

[Mannify]

I found the wikipedia page really informative, Smiley, and it also mentioned the link between AS and auditory perception deficit. I honestly don't think I have APD as a singular and overriding condition; rather, it is a feature of my communication - not a profound one, but an annoying one .

[raydon]

I came across this article in the New York Times which is interesting.

 

By SETH S. HOROWITZ

 

Published: November 9, 2012

 

 

HERE’S a trick question. What do you hear right now?

 

If your home is like mine, you hear the humming sound of a printer, the low throbbing of traffic from the nearby highway and the clatter of plastic followed by the muffled impact of paws landing on linoleum — meaning that the cat has once again tried to open the catnip container atop the fridge and succeeded only in knocking it to the kitchen floor.

 

The slight trick in the question is that, by asking you what you were hearing, I prompted your brain to take control of the sensory experience — and made you listen rather than just hear. That, in effect, is what happens when an event jumps out of the background enough to be perceived consciously rather than just being part of your auditory surroundings. The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.

 

Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.

 

This is because hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere within the kilometer or so that your ears can detect.

This is where attention kicks in.

 

Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain. The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second — elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.

 

More complex attention kicks in when you hear your name called from across a room or hear an unexpected birdcall from inside a subway station. This stimulus-directed attention is controlled by pathways through the temporoparietal and inferior frontal cortex regions, mostly in the right hemisphere — areas that process the raw, sensory input, but don’t concern themselves with what you should make of that sound. (Neuroscientists call this a “bottom-up” response.)

 

But when you actually pay attention to something you’re listening to, whether it is your favorite song or the cat meowing at dinnertime, a separate “top-down” pathway comes into play. Here, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your cortex, part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on what you’re hearing and tune out sights and sounds that aren’t as immediately important.

 

In this case, your brain works like a set of noise-suppressing headphones, with the bottom-up pathways acting as a switch to interrupt if something more urgent — say, an airplane engine dropping through your bathroom ceiling — grabs your attention.

Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

 

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

And yet we dare not lose it. Because listening tunes our brain to the patterns of our environment faster than any other sense, and paying attention to the nonvisual parts of our world feeds into everything from our intellectual sharpness to our dance skills.

Luckily, we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics. You may save yourself a couple of fights.

 

“You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.

 

 

Seth S. Horowitz is an auditory neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of “The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.”

[Mannify]

Thanks, Raydon, very interesting article

[Mike_GX101]

I discovered recently that I also have an auditory processing disability.

 

It was not an obvious problem because my hearing is fine and I often hear things before others do. But if someone phones me up out of the blue and wants me to pass a message on I don't always get the message right when I then pass it on. I try to remedy this by recording it verbatum-style/word-for-word and then re-reading what I've read (as I process things visually much better). I am then able to verbally forward that message to the next person more accurately by making sense of my notes.

 

Other times I have difficulties is when I'm given an instruction verbally and it takes me a while to understand it. This is frustrating in the train station for instance where the timetable monitors are broken and only the speakers are working.

Edited November 13, 2012 by Mike_GX101

[darkshine]

I find it difficult to understand people with certain accents until I tune in, and hearing is a funny thing because my netbook on sleep drives me nuts as it sounds a very quiet and high-pitched alarm - and yet I listen to music really loud - I don't hear when people call my name in the street because I'm concentrating on other things, yet I am aware of the sound of my footsteps.

 

All fun stuff

[Mike_GX101]

I am just glad retrospectively that the internet didn't turn out to be solely voice/sound-based.

 

If this forum for example had been sound-based (i.e. voicemail-style where you listen to forum messages and verbally record your own messages and replies) then I would not have benefited to the same extent. The internet has played to my strengths as I'm much stronger with visual processing than with audio processing. And for that I am really grateful.

[darkshine]

If this forum was voice/sound based I wouldn't have ever joined it

[Mannify]

Writing is ace compared to verbal conversation, because my mental processes can be so slow when aural processing is involved, especially if it's a stressful situation. There's a big difference with me between someone coming up to me and demanding, "What's your name?" and me writing an essay or doing an exam. I'm better once I'm in comfortable, unpressured conversation with someone, though.

[robert7111a]

I've been away from the forum for a while. Yes, APD occurs due to an impairment in the automatic noise suppression system in the brain (specifically the "top down" efferent auditory system) that causes the basilar membrane in the cochlea to dampen down the vibrations. APD often occurs in the presence of other SpLD's (co-morbidity) where it takes second place in the diagnosis of (for example) HFA but can also occur due to neurological injury after (for example) a car accident. There is unfortunately no cure for APD.

[Mannify]

Thanks for the info, Robert. It's cool to have a forum resident expert on aural issues .

[robert7111a]

Oh...thank you Mannify...I still don't know everything about ears but I also have a friend who has APD.

 

We can't go for coffee in "normal" places like Starbucks, Costa etc so have to go somewhere really quiet. She's been moved to a busy office at work and now struggles a lot. Telephone work is also a problem. I get hyperacusis when tired or stressed. If somebody gives me too many verbal instructions, I've forgotten what to do.

[Mike_GX101]

I get hyperacusis when tired or stressed. If somebody gives me too many verbal instructions, I've forgotten what to do.

 

Hyperacusis - Mmm now there's an interesting word I hadn't heard of before but the condition it describes I identify with very well.

 

What I want to know though is this - does everyone who has hyperacusis also have autism like the autistic diagnostic apparatus appears to suggest? When I first heard about autism one of the big symptoms was "sensitivity to noises others don't notice".

 

While being sensitive to loud noises may be a main symptom for autism should it not be differentiated from autism to reflect on the fact that maybe not everyone with autism has hyperacusis? Shouldn't the symptom's checker for autism read "individual may also have hyperacusis" thereby identifying it as an entirely different condition which may be present with the autism?

[robert7111a]

No, hyperacusis and "sensitivity to noises" are two different things although the underlying mechanisms might be similar.

 

Hyperacusis describes a reduced tolerance to loud sounds whilst "sensitivity to noises" describes sensitivity to quiet sounds such as the buzz of fluorescent lights, air conditioning units where the normal squelch function within the brain is impaired

 

Then I suppose this raises the question of "what is loud?"

 

Interesting though...

[Sa Skimrande]

Slow aural processing, in noisy environments someone talking to me right in front of me I can't hear them and have to beckon them to speak to me in a quieter environment as the background noise is all there is and from them all I here is a series is hisses and pops with sometimes a word i recognise, but as I focus on the word, I lose it all.

 

But of instructions, I find I have to get the instructor to break up the instruction into portions otherwise I just forget straight away, in one one ear and out the other applies well.

 

And I have learned, if I wish to learn anything, write it down, then revising, read it out loud to myself.

[Mike_GX101]

When my eyes are tired, I am able to significantly improve my vision with a few simple eye exercises which involve circling my eyes, doing some neck exercises (to free the nerves up) and looking at things that are far away and then drawing them closer and then moving them further away again - this helps with focus.

 

But this focus-improvement works with hearing too. It's a little like tuning into a radio station only this time you're tuning-in to another person. It is possible to do and with repetition you will be better at it too - practice makes perfect. Try it. Listen intently to one person in a group where several people are speaking at once and then move to another person. Listen at how you are able, with practice, to hone-in and hone-out of sounds. Your ears are truly amazing - but you have to make them work for you too!

[watergirl]

A very interesting subject and was one of the things that was picked up when I tried to explain to the Jobcentre that I can't hear people in noisy environments and need clear instructions re work tasks.....I cannot remember verbal instructions of any complexity unless I can associate them with something visual or "walk" the task through in my mind, assuming the instructions are slow and simple enough. I am also a very visual person regarding instructions/directions and agree with what's been said previously.........but I can study a map for a short while and then drive 200 miles to an address without usually needing to look at the map again.

Regarding hearing though, I also suffer from Tinnitis........it doesn't actually bother me that much most of the time as it is mostly high pitched, but occasionally I get low pitched noise too, which does bother me more. The high pitched noises/whistles are peculiar, as I can separate them out if I concentrate, and it is rather like a chord at the very very high end of a synthesizer......made up of at least 3 notes. When I get my music studio sorted out I'm going to try and identify the notes I can hear on my new synth, I want to know if this has a bearing on my preference to play guitar in certain keys......all very interesting. I have to say that I think I'd miss the Tinnitis if it went away......odd I know, but it's sort of comforting!

[trekster]

No, hyperacusis and "sensitivity to noises" are two different things although the underlying mechanisms might be similar.

 

Hyperacusis describes a reduced tolerance to loud sounds whilst "sensitivity to noises" describes sensitivity to quiet sounds such as the buzz of fluorescent lights, air conditioning units where the normal squelch function within the brain is impaired

 

Then I suppose this raises the question of "what is loud?"

 

Interesting though...

I'm confused how can you be sensitive to quiet sounds? My hearing is really painful and at times typing on a PC keyboard hurts my ears. Unless you mean the pitch? High pitch is a problem for me but lower pitch eg bass boxes vibration type noise is fine.

[robert7111a]

Some people are "oversensitive" to quiet sounds (such as the hum of a fridge/buzz of fluorescent lights) that "normal" people tune out. These people find said sounds annoying and distracting. My hearing is so sensitive I can literally hear silence (ever heard of Brownian motion?)

[trekster]

Ah im starting to understand I think you meant so called quiet sounds because they are louder to an autistic?

I haven't heard of the Brownian motion but I can also hear silence which is 1 reason why ear plugs won't work for me.

[watergirl]

Hmm, I spent most of last night lying awake listening to the silence?......or Tinnitis I think.......and when the house made some of it's usual creaks and cracking sounds I really jumped...........and it got me thinking: If, compared to a NT person, I have a delay between my brain receiving the sound and recognising what the sound is, then surely there must be a fractionally longer period that the sound is perceived as a potential threat, and therefore the body goes into defence mode. ....hence wide awake. My hearing is hypersensitive, so this means I am effectively very jumpy/nervous........but surely that must be the reason why?

Also, if I'm in a situation where I'm trying to listen to instructions in a noisy place, this must mean my brain is sorting out all the potential threats in the "background" noise and can't focus on the one thing that is definitely not a threat.....the voice of the person talking to me.

 

Another thing regarding verbal instructions........If I'm given directions, for example, I can remember them if given slowly enough to visualise them........so is the slow aural processing to do with converting/adding visualised information?

Edited November 27, 2012 by watergirl