Trouble understanding what people are saying?

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Catching the lyrics to songs (or not): this is a phenomenon that seems to happen often. Take a look:

Mondegreen - TV TROPES.

cats don't do pretend stuff.

I have a lot of trouble understanding what people are saying. And get tired of having to ask them to repeat themselves. Especially if they are doing the same with me and we just keep saying "what?! !" back and forth.

I also have trouble with song lyrics, especially if they're not clearly enunciated. I have to look them up very often. Except in rap, where the vocals are at the forefront. (And most of that is stuff I'd rather not understand.)

It' amazing what I can come up with when I don't understand they song lyrics. I phonetically hear sounds and the words I come up with for those song lyrics can be quite hilarious! I can also have a very wrong and innocent understanding about what songs are really about. There is a really old song called She's A Brick House, I always thought she was a body builder like a competitive weight lifter. Someone had to explain to me what that song was really about a couple of years ago.

certainly happens to me. maybe it's sensory processing disorder, but i cant always catch the words in a song played on the radio, or understand what someone's saying while talking to me, or in a movie. and no, it's not my hearing.

I realized something else as well. I don't always misunderstand, but sometimes I will say "what?" anyway just to give me time to process what they said (and probably just out of habit considering how often I do misunderstand).

I always hear what people say but half the time I don't register what people say, a quarter of the time I say what then as I've finished saying what I realise what they say and then the other quarter there are no issues.

I do this, but also to verify what I thought I heard the first time in order to avoid mistakes.

Someone should start a thread about misunderstood song lyrics. That could be very entertaining.

Good observation. I've never been terribly interested in fiction apart from the kind of humour found in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or Mr Bean or similar.

Our household doesn't have a TV. Many novels and movies are just way too violent for my taste. I can't identify with the characters, my attention drifts away from reading or listening, and I completely fail to see the point. When I am traveling on a plane, I sometimes do a quick scan what the people around me are watching when walking back from the toilet, and I find it quite shocking.

When people are engaged in small talk, I have learned that there is not much to be understood. My mind automatically tries to escape to the things that I actually care about.

This research is possibly related http://www.mpg.de/7738341/brain-archite ... aydreaming:

?Our findings suggest that the structural architecture of the brain ensures that it automatically switches to something useful when it is not being used for other activities,? says Andreas Horn. ?But the brain only stays on autopilot until an external stimulus causes activity in another network, putting an end to the daydreaming. A buzzing fly, a loud bang in the distance, or focused concentration on a text, for example.?

I can well imagine that autistic brains use a different categorisation scheme for external stimuli, leading to different decisions about what is useful or not.

Sometimes I understand the words while I'm completely unable to understand the sentence.

That's interesting information jbw, I don't as a rule watch any films because my attention wanders to other things on screen and not on the main players. I then lose the thread.

I have that problem, too. I vividly remember a situation that occurred when I was in 6th grade. My teacher, Miss Perkins, was teaching us about the Badlands of South Dakota. Because I couldn't imagine that anyone would actually call the place "bad lands," I raised my hand to clarify what she'd said. I remember asking if she had actually said "Vadlands," or something similar. She got quite annoyed with my apparent stupidity or refusal to listen to what she was saying. My hearing was fine; I just couldn't make sense of the term she was using.

Last edited by untilwereturn on 15 Sep 2014, 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Along similar lines, I have a really hard time comprehending a verbal string of numbers at the speed people normally rattle them out. Whenever someone leaves me a voicemail, I usually end up needing to play it back several times to understand a phone number. It drives me nuts how people will recite it with easy familiarity, not considering that this is new information to someone else.

Whenever I leave my number on someone else's voicemail, I recite it slowly and deliberately, usually repeating it a second time so they don't have to "rewind" it multiple times like I do. Then again, I suppose most people don't have the same problem so I'm probably just annoying them with my slowness.

Last edited by untilwereturn on 15 Sep 2014, 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah, this is actually one of the clearer, more defining characteristics of how ASD effects me. When I think about it, I notice that I do a lot of filling in based on the context of the situation. For example, I might hear my wife say over the sound of the TV "could you put the #### on the ****". And I'll infer from there that **** means stove because I'm in the kitchen, and #### was chicken because that's what we had planned for dinner that night. I think I also do some lip reading to assist with the problem, but that's difficult to tell because every time I try to think about it, the act of thinking about it changes how I'm acting in that moment.

Of course, that's not always feasible. I lose more and more words as background noise goes up, which takes more and more effort to piece back together what was actually said, and eventually becomes impossible past a certain threshold. It's also harder when I don't know the person well, or we're talking about something unfamiliar where I don't have a lot of context. In those situations, I start to withdraw, or sometimes even go into shut down if it's really bad.