Asperger's and music

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When I am not listening to music my thoughts are usually going a thousand miles an hour and I can't focus on anything at all. When I do it's like a magical lightbulb suddenly turns on and I instantly hyperfocus on whatever I need to do. I swear its almost like drugs. Anyone else like this?

wish I could do like that, but I am a monotasker and so I can't listen to music while doing anything else, unless I stop paying attention to the music.

Yes. I can be like that as well. I often have racing incessant thoughts and music I like can get me to focus on the music and rest my mind and it helps me do things like paying bills and folding laundry.

Me too. Except I can't stop paying attention to the music, so I can only do really simple or repetitive things while there's music on.

Ooooh yes. Without music I can't function when I'm "working". I've had this track on repeat all day ...

https://soundcloud.com/joshuamorse/turtle-dance-2

You'll love it if you like Chiptunes. I show everyone this song because I think it's awesome, and they're all like "meh". But this song is a drug to me at the moment.

I just find silence oppressive for some reason, it drives me insane. Sometimes when I'm trying to get to sleep at night I have to get up and listen to something or watch a tv show, because my mind is swimming with math problems, logic problems, things that happened to me during the day, conversations I had, etc, and my thoughts just refuse to shut up.

I like having brown noise on in the background while I'm working.

"math and logic problems" ... Discrete mathematics by any chance? You sound like a programmer.

in that respect you are outperforming me

I do web design as a hobby. I know HTML, Javascript, C++, C# and Python. My day job is taxes (which thankfully is over today)

So do I - I have a little fan heater that is almost always running when I work. At some point I realised that I need it just as much, if not more, for the sound it makes as for temperature regulation.



Well, that'd definitely be the only aspect in which I'm outperforming anyone at the moment...

Yes - and there doesn't really seem to be such a thing as total silence. If there's no other sound, my head rings. Mostly, though, any extraneous sound is distracting, and having music on covers all the other noise with something more pleasant and consistent. The only time I don't have music playing is when I'm watching TV, otherwise it's 24/7. At night it's turned down very low, but it's still playing.

I don't know whether or not it particularly improves my focus, I still have a hard time getting down to the task at hand, but once I'm in the zone, it does keep the audible distractions to a minimum.

It's the opposite for me, I can't focus on anything while music is playing.

Very much so, except I feel like I'm in an overwhelmed daze without it. I need music to cook or clean, and usually for driving too. It gets me mentally unstuck and moving forward.

I sure wished I could listen to music while I drive, but I do so at my peril.

When I was in high school and college and doing an lot of math and physics, I listened to Bach to help me do the problems. Now I compose music as a hobby, so I don't listen to music while I'm doing that, and the other things I have to do for my work are so simple that I don't need to have music on. Anyway, I think that music helps doing mathematical problems