How come the smallest sounds get on my nerves!?

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I'm really sensitive to sound where I feel like nobody else I know is. If it's constant background noise, I have no problem. But in class, I feel like I hear every foot shuffle. Every piece of paper turn. Every cough or sneeze. And every time I hear this my brain just auto-redirects from my work to whatever noise I hear, effectively breaking my concentration. This also happens when I'm trying to converse with someone in a busy area, like a hospital. I'll be talking to someone and every noise I hear distracts me to the point where I completely forget what I was talking about and feel like an idiot.

Sometimes I get really jumpy with light touch as well, like it's a slight shock to my nervous system (this goes away two seconds after it happens, it's just the initial shock that surprises me and makes me jumpy)

IDK if it's relavent or not but I have bad information processing. I have to read things quite a few times before I actually absorb it. And even then I have trouble recalling it and explaining it to someone. Almost like it's buried so deep in my brain I can't access the information as fast as I need to.

Is this an ADHD thing? Aspergers?

A hatred of small sounds is called misophonia. Do the sounds make you angry?

Welcome to the ASD jungle. It also fluctuates for you, doesn't it? Many people with ASDs have sensory issues. This can be helped with various techniques like wearing earplugs to cut out the high end, or wearing a deep compression vest, which is relaxing and also helps concentration issues, as well.

It's an evolutionary remnant from when people had to be on the lookout for predators and also prey I believe. As weird as that sounds.

Oh - and the need to read things several times before it sinks in seems like it would be due to this ingrained tendency for the autistic brain to focus on any "active" stuff going on in the environment, however small, rather than the obviously immobile and safe words on a page.

Indeed. I was reading in a journal that it could be caused by a larger or more active amygdala, which regulates flight-and-fight response as well as emotional response to external stimuli, or something like that.

Sound sensitivity is very broad. It can be a reaction to too much sound (big loud noises), or it can be a reaction to distinct, repeated, small sounds (tapping, sniffing, snoring, eating, drinking, etc). There are many different ways to be have sensory sensitivity.

I am sensitive to eating and drinking noises, among other sounds, which is fairly close to your problem: soft, repeated sounds, rather than big loud noises.

so-called tiny noises are useful in that noticing them saves me from later problems- like the tiny sound of scratching in the walls tells me that there are vermin to be taken care of. but it also is torture, like when one is driving a noisy rattly squeaky old jalopy, and every little bump makes something rattle or vibrate of squeak. squeaks and rattles drive me batty. phonographic surface noise drives me batty. i can tell a person is NT [or hard-of-hearing] if they don't notice such things.