Help with listening

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I have a speech processing problem. I can only listen and understand maybe 5 or 10 minutes of someone talking. From then on, all speech sounds continue to sound the same, but the sounds stop making any sense or having any meaning. This happens in quiet places, so it's not caused by background noise or lack of filter. So speech processing problem + unspeakably high levels of boredom = please please please eberryone stfu for me.

I wish I could figure out how to activate my rewind!

Central Auditory Processing Disorder.

I went to an audiologist because my husband insisted I was losing my hearing. In insisted I could hear just fine, I just couldn't understand what was being said half of the time.

I went through an extensive battery of tests and as it turns out, my hearing is slightly better than what would be expected in someone my age. I was informed it is not a hearing problem, it is a processing problem.

It's very annoying and probably equally responsible for my dislike of "parties" as my is my feeling of general awkwardness. I hate that I can't understand what people are saying and I hate always having to ask people to repeat themselves. It is also probably a major contributor to why I don't like to talk on the phone. I feel like I miss about 1/3 of what is said and so it is very mentally taxing trying to follow the conversation.

I never had heard of anyone else having this problem until I started hanging out in ASD/ADHD circles. Then I realized there are all sorts of people who have it.

This has kind of helped for my son. When his teachers asked me for "tips" one of the first ones I gave them was when you think he is misbehaving or being belligerent, find out what he thinks is going on because 99.9% of the time, it will not match what you think is going on.

I am curious...do you have any insight into why you think that happens? BTW I enjoy reading the majority of your posts because they make me think of things in new ways.

I have trouble with listening myself although I don't have have an ASD, I probably have ADD. What I found helped me listen better was Toastmasters and Karate. Toastmasters because you to listen how somebody speaks like whether they say uh a lot or how they deliver a message. Because you are critiquing how somebody speaks you end up listening to the whole speech better. Karate I don't know the science behind it but listening to those repetitive movements helped me listen elsewhere in my life. Of course you lose the effect when you quit doing the activities but they did definitely help at the time.

It seems like it is hard for my brain to process speech. Other than that, I don't know. Audiobooks are useless to me. I would never listen to one. It would be self-inflicted torture. A sure sign of madness, if I ever listened to an audiobook.

I noticed that some non-verbal kids can't handle too much speaking in quiet places. Some put their fingers in their ears when someone has talked too much around them. Some walk around with their hands over their ears most of the time, but that is probably to block out all the noise, not just speech.

It is just awful to listen to people talk, like more than 10 minutes is torture. Some people just can't handle it, so for children with this problem, I really suggest some alternative form of educational instruction. Instruction through speaking has problems of causing sensory overload and lack of learning, and is also really slow, so the slowness is probably a factor too to cause the overwhelming boredom. I find that my brain needs constant fast fast fast stimulation to not have the horrible boredom feeling. Ackshuly, I wonder if this is an adhd trait that I have. I don't have the full set of adhd traits to have adhd, but I probably have some, like some people have autistic traits without having autism.

Interesting...so are you saying you think it is because the level of concentration required to listen to speech is so intense that it leads to mental fatigue? It's a capacity issue?

I think that it is more of a speech processing problem in which meaning goes away and leaves the same sounds without meaning/language. I am good at processing most other things. I think the need for constant fast stimulation is the adhd trait I have. That is another factor, because people convery meaning too slow through speaking. It's much faster and more stimulating to read the same thing.

So, at least in part, it is an arousal issue? Sorry to keep asking questions like this, but I think I am starting to understand something I didn't understand before.

I understand a bit about what you mean with the stimulation part. I probably could have taught myself most every class except math from books a lot easier than listening to someone lecture. In fact, in college I used to get mad if the professor just lectured straight from the book because it was so much easier for me to just read it.

Maybe multiple factors:

speech processing problem?
working memory problem?
attention problem?
arousal problem?
social motivation problem? Are the above problems caused by lack of social brain connections making non-autistic people automatically attentive to hoooman speech and good at processing meaning from it and autistic people less so? In eggstreme case, there are severely autistic non-verbal children with poor receptive language, and they don't understand most of what people say to them. These are guesses. All I can say based on my eggsperience is that I have a very specific problem with hoooman speech. Research studies have shown that autistic children have atypical brain responses to speech, but not music. We'd have to set up a laboratory and study this in depth to find out some clues why.

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but it certainly is the case for me.

Thanks for your input nonetheless!

This is such a helpful thread.

Do you recognise this:
My son describes people's voices rather than what they say or how they act. I know he has trouble socializing with the other kids but when I ask him about it, if he answers at all, he will say that he or she has "not a nice voice" or a "high pitched annoying voice" or a "deep bad voice".
He seems to pay much more attention to how they sound than what they actually say. Which makes it hard for me to help him.

Does he have face blindness? My son focuses on irrelevant features sometimes because that is how he recognizes the person. He can recognize people he knows very well and people he has a lot of exposure to (so long as they are in the "right" environment), but sometimes he will not recognize someone until they speak. Then he knows who they are.

I'm not sure. He doesn't pay attention to other people that's for sure. Despite being at someone's house many times with me he most likely won't remembered who they are, what their name was or sometimes even if they are male or female.

When he was a baby he could walk off with complete strangers or walk over to someone on a restaurant and climb up in their lap. No idea if that's face blindness :S