Can you tell if a person is talking to you or someone else?

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I wanted to know if this is just me being clueless or a problem others have too.

Yesterday I walked into a shop and the shopkeeper said "Hi, how are you?". I looked around and saw others in the shop and didn't know if he was talking to me or to them so I didn't reply. I couldn't read the situation and didn't want to look silly by replying if the question wasn't meant for me.

For many years I would often get caught out by replying to someone's question when the question wasn't meant for me. Or replying to someone's "hi" assuming they were aiming it at me when infact they were actually talking to someone else. This lead to me feeling stupid and consequently ignoring people unless I am completely sure it is me they are talking to (which is not easy to ascertain).

It is more of a problem with people I don't know well, for example people you walk past in the street but don't actually know by name.

Do you have this problem too or any advice as to how to get around it and not look like an idiot?

Venus

I've made those types of mistakes a lot. But not as much anymore. What I do is just say: "Sorry, are you talking to me?", even if they were "obviously" talking to me.

It is a little awkward. But it's much less awkward than mistakenly jumping in front of somebody else's greeting. And much, much less awkward than inadvertently ignoring somebody's greeting altogether.

if there is no one else in the vicinity, then i think they are talking to me.
if, in the circumstance that there is no one else around, and they are not talking to me, then they are talking to themselves so i do not care whether i reply to what they say.

i do not understand why people talk to themselves because they should already know what they are going to say, so it seems superfluous for them to go through the futile exercise of saying it. if i reply and they tell me they were not talking to me, i think they are silly.

if someone talks to me in a crowd, then sometimes i know if they are talking to me because if what they say is a correct response to a question i asked, then it seems likely that they are talking to me.

also it is possible to acoustically determine that a voice's focal point is centered on my head.
if my ear is in the direct line of the sound source, then it has a sharp quality that is not present in any point of a peripheral radius.

often i do not respond to what people say to me because i am not in a "listening" mode.

if someone shouts out "mark!! !" from the other side of the street, it does not make me turn around because i do not respond to the sound of my name like most people do.

i did a test once when i was in the tavern with someone and i said to them i could tell them how many "michael's" were in the room. then i yelled "hey michael" and i counted the heads that turned to look at me. that is how i know that people are hypersensitive to the sound of their name.
i do not share this attribute.

I often miss this. Sometimes I may respond when someone else is being addressed and sometimes I may not respond when someone is saying something to me.

Not always, perhaps usually not

This definitely happens to me. It often takes me about a second after I've heard and utterance completed and fully processed all the verbal and (if I'm lucky enough to notice it) non-verbal information before I realize whether or not I'm being spoken to. My first impression is always to assume that anything someone is saying is directed at me.

Yeah, it can be a pain. Especially if I have the same name as someone else in the vicinity .

I can tell, by who that person is looking at.

Sometimes, when people are talking loud enough for me to clearly understand. I then answer, but find out halfway that I was not supposed to.

Yes, I do this a lot.

Yep, looking at the person's eye contact is key. I remember a couple of situations where people (perhaps this is some type of disorder) seem to look at one direction but they are not. Pretty much, to put it bluntly, their eyes are messed up. Anyway, its really hard to tell if they were talking to me.

People talk to themselves because the act of speaking and hearing the words helps them think. There's nothing mysterious or silly about it.

I have a hard time with this, especially at family gatherings. Both of my cousins (one on mom's, one on dad's) married Amandas so whenever I hear the name I always assume it's for the other Amanda because 95% of the time, it is. I think I'm sort of invisible in my family so that may be why though.

If I'm not expecting someone to talk to me, I nearly always miss it. I even have trouble in situations like waiting for help in a store from a salesperson, or standing around anywhere that someone might suddenly pop a question out at me. There's just a steady low moan of voices in public places, and I can't pick out any one particular voice, nor can I perceive a voice aimed at my attention. It's just a whirlwind of words, all clearly audible but none meaningful or in context. Many words will be broken up into syllables; so that I hear only one syllable from one person's word, then it's overtaken by the second syllable of someone else' word. My only hope is to be watching to see someone focus on me, then I can tune in their direction and be read to hear their words.

Same thing if I go to a dinner with several guests... It's HARD WORK to try to pay attention to see if, and if so how, I need to react to conversation. Sometimes I wish I were deaf, so that nobody would expect me to know what they're all talking about, and with whom. I need to be summoned by means other than just simple body language, such as having my wife poke me . Otherwise I haven't a clue that I need to hear something. I wish I had a button with encoded numbers, and each person at the table may have a remote control to buzz me in, when it's something I need to hear or respond to.

Also I should mention that my hearing is "superior to medically perfect", so that's not the problem with failure to hear conversations.

Charles

Last edited by kx250rider on 02 Jun 2010, 10:31 am, edited 3 times in total.

This has happened to me before, when the person in question is looking right at me but actually talking to someone behind me. I feel like such an idiot when I respond too! Luckily no one really notices.

Yes; that too, as I forgot to say in my post. I hate that! They look at me like I'm into myself to dare think they were ever talking to me. That happens particularly in places where there is a policeman giving directions to traffic, or a store clerk saying "your order is ready", etc.... Sometimes I'll have the sense to turn around and see if there's anyone behind me ahead of time, so I can be prepared to better figure out who's being addressed when the time comes.

Charles