So I was chatting to my (NT) wife a couple of days ago, and mentioned that while if I'm concentrating on someone or expecting them to speak, I have no difficulty making out their words and understanding, however if someone says something at an unexpected time, there's a lot of background noise, or I'm paying attention to something else, I may hear noise, but I don't hear words. Rather, I hear disconnected sounds, running into each other. If I concentrate quickly, I can replay them in my head, connect them up, and figure out what the words that were used were. But really, unless I'm concentrating on what someone is saying, all I hear is noises. It's like the normal ability to just hear words has an extra layer of processing for me, or I perceive things too slowly to connect them up properly, and so have to then work out what the noises mean.
Is this an aspergian thing? When you hear someone speak, especially if you were not concentrating on them, what do you hear? Is it words, or is it noise that you then have to interpret and turn into words?
I found this very interesting, because a few weeks ago another site I read mentioned The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon. It's a near future sci-fi book, whose protagonist is autistic. Moon's son is also autistic, and on the book's website, she wrote an essay on what she believes autism is, at least in terms of our brains processing things. Her theory is that autistic brains process certain sensory information too slowly for it to be useful, and so many of the social cues we receive (which come thick and fast) are simply too quick for us to process (special interests and pattern recognition fills the void left by the fact we don't take this information in - nature abhors a vacuum, and so also our brains don't sit idle). Here's what she says about language:
Quote:
Imagine a computer keyboard. You press A and A appears on the screen; it has also reached the central processor, so that if A is a command (A for add, A for another, A for Aunt Alice's email address) the computer responds to that command. The speed of transmission of that electrical signal makes it possible to send commands, or type a message, as fast as you can type. Now imagine that the keyboard has a very slow connection. You type A, and nothing happens. The seconds tick by. Finally an A pops up on the screen. It would take a long time to compose a message to Aunt Alice--or to give a series of commands for an accounting program--if you had such a slow connection. Or suppose the keyboard would not transmit an A at all unless you pressed on the A key for five seconds. That would also slow down the transmission of information, even if the actual transmission time were the same.
The human nervous system can have similar glitches. Research has shown that some people have "slower" nerves than others--it takes longer for an electrical impulse to travel from the finger to the brain than it does for others. And it's also shown that some people need sensory impulses to last longer before they're captured (slow capture rate.) This can have serious consequences. For instance, in normal speech, the sounds of many consonants are very brief--on the order of 75 milliseconds. If an infant cannot capture such brief sounds--needs the sound to last, say, 200 or 300 milliseconds before it's "caught"--then the infant will not even "hear" the sounds of most consonants. If the infant doesn't hear them, then they don't become part of the library of speech sounds which the infant uses to build a model of speech, and understand which sounds are speech and which aren't. Some non-autistic children with severe language delay have exactly this problem. Some autistic adults who can now talk have described what speech sounded like to them when they were small--and they say it was like 'mooing' or 'groaning'--full of vowel sounds, not consonants.
I think my sensory experience fits with this rather well. It's not as extreme, but it feels like it's the same sort of symptoms, just not as bad. Like there's a disconnect in the processing time, everything comes in delayed. When I'm concentrating, I've learned my way around this - so well, in fact, that it doesn't even occur to me that I'm doing something complex, like riding a bicycle. But if I'm not concentrating, well then things come in slow, delayed, and don't make sense. I have to capture the sounds, process them separately, and turn them into something intelligible. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. And, to add insult to injury, I'll often get my rearrangements and stringing together wrong, trying to guess at what the person speaking to me was trying to say, fitting the sounds together, and coming out with something which has roughly the same structure of syllables but which actually has little to do with what they were really saying. Needless to say, this annoys the cr*p out of the person who was talking to me.
Thoughts?
_________________
"You're never more alone than when you're alone in a crowd"
-Captain Sheridan, Babylon 5
Music of the Moment: Radiohead - In Rainbows
26 Dec 2007, 6:31 pm
My mother, who at 58 got fitted for hearing aids, has started making "helpful" comments to me about, "maybe we should schedule an appointment with my audiologist." Yeah, right. That's why I can hear the brakes squeak on the car, even though neither you or the mechanic can. Like I said, oy.
