Do aspies have better hearing?

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And this too shall pass....


I had phenomenal hearing until 40... despite years of sticking my head in bass bins.

I could hear the 1st harmonic of a flyback transformer (31250Hz) as a teenager.

I once watched the tech giving me a hearing test look suspicious.. and start fiddling with the equipment. He later said my frequency response and sensitivity were "unusual" and he was making sure I wasnt cheating... somehow.

I'm still pretty good with subsonics at night...When I tell people the ostriches are booming... nobody else ever hears it. I can identify individual signatures for the 88mm howitzers at the firing range 40 miles away.

But I can't stand cacophony... I can't understand conversation through a background.
Loud noises render me unable to think. I detest club music...however.. if it's a band I like... I can enjoy volumes that would ordinarily send me screaming.
Just bounce through the slam pack and let my stims go wild.
(Closest I get to dancing...lol)

Just don't talk to me until the encore's over and I've done my last stage dive.

I also had superlative vision... better than 30/20.
I could read roadsigns nobody else could.

What puzzles me is how I could not only tell that spot on the horizon is a human... but the gender too.

Alas... age mutes all things... now I need glasses.
but I can still tell that far off smudge is female..

for some reason, when i watch tv my family sometimes say,
are you sure you can hear that?
when i can.
loud noises like yelling and banging annoy me.

Funny how people ALWAYS say "Can you hear that?" They always reply "Hear what?!?"

It's also funny how the TV was never really muted but when ever I switched the sound off I could still hear it barely.

I once heard my phone ring from the next room with very loud music. I think we can filter out sounds, but when the sounds are ever changing they seem to be very complex as we want sounds and not a mess - am talking about speech. It must be annoying for the person to think that we must be crazy, I am always hearing them, but actually understanding what they said from some weird sounds to speech takes much longer in comparison to NTs

Hyperacusis is really common in ASD.

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

Even though you have no difficulty with and over sensitivity to some sounds you have trouble with discrimination of conversation in a noisey environment because of Auditory Processing difficulties. More specifically Auditory discrimination problems, sometimes it is called auditory figure ground.

There is a visual equivalent too .. being able to find a specific item in a very busy or confusing picture. Kind of like the Auditory equivalent of where's wally.

A quick and easy fix to be able to hear someone that is talking to you in a busy room or noisy environment is using musicians ear plugs ( if you can cope with the feeling of them in your ears. They screen out the background noise, but allow you to hear conversation close to you.

There is a webpage about it here. http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/ea ... itory.html this is about children .. but the general information is the same. Not everyone with ASD has this, but it is prevalent for quite a few people on the spectrum.

There is a page with the special earplugs that allow you to hear conversation while screening out background noise here. http://earplugstore.stores.yahoo.net/nasopl.html
If you don't mind being in the company of people but cannot cope with the large background noise of large numbers of people etc.. these can help

I also noticed this website has whitenoise machines for people that have insomnia that need some background noise to be able to sleep.. but without the distractions of music/radio.

I don't know about Aspies in general, but my hearing is very good.

My hearing is poor due to family history and many ear infections as a kid. One of the main issues is I have trouble hearing at the low and high end of the frequencies because of that. The other thing that really gives me fits is background noise as I can't filter out sounds. I think the autism may have some to do with that, however my dad and grandfather had the same issues but maybe not to the extent I do. That being said what I notice more is the change in pitch, for example if I'm filling the windshield wash on the car I can tell it's almost full even if I'm not looking among other things like that.

I always hear things others can't. I can take a walk in my neighborhood and hear people's phones ringing or their TVs on.

I can hear the door of a car closing shut while watching tv, but I cannot understand poeple when they talk fast or there is background noise. Propably why i don't like clubs.

i can hear sounds that are "out of range" of normal hearing, i guess... like when a tv turns on, for that split second before sound and visual appear, i can hear the electricity flowing into it. actually, it kinda feels like a painfully void silence.. it's hard to discribe, but it's unplesant. plus, there have been times where i've been near a radio that's turned off and suddenly had a song in my head, and i'll be singing the lyrics and then i turn on the radio and that exact song is playing and they're on the exact same lyric i'm singing.. i could never explain this... still can't.

but, my ears are also very sensitive to air pressure changes.. if i'm in the car, i will sometimes need to crack a window on each side of the car or i'll get car sick. if the window's cracked on only one side, the pressure is off-balance and it drives me crazy!! and if i'm just sitting in the car, and someone slams the car door, the sudden air pressure change hurts my ears.... but maybe this has something to do with the fact that i had so many ear infections when i was a kid. i donno.