Hyper focus vs distractibility; or, Why I Think I'm Not AS

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I fit perfectly into the AS diagnosis except for this one very different thing. It makes me think maybe this isn't me after all.

Many people (on here, for example) say they get easily distracted from things like school work when there are loud noises or people chattering. I have the opposite problem. If I'm working on school work, or reading a book, or...doing anything that requires any amount of mental stimulation, actually...I hyper focus. I was called "the absent minded professor" in elementary school because of this. I can drown out absolutely everything else around me and I have done this since I was a very small child. My parents used to joke that "if the house caught on fire you wouldn't know it until your book started to burn." Screaming at me, sometimes even shaking me won't get me out of my head, the only thing my parents ever found that worked was sticking something in between my eyes and whatever I was doing.

I DO get shocked by loud or sudden noises (a frequent saying by my husband is "You DO know I live here, right?" Flirtatiously mocking, not mean.) but I never clamp my hands over my ears, I just scream. But grocery stores, airports, etc, just turn me into a zombie in my own head, they don't freak me out.

(As a kid if too many people were talking to me at once I would just start flapping my hands. Now I just scream. But most people do, right? No one likes multiple people talking to them at once.)

Does this sound like maybe all my other AS-like problems aren't AS at all since I don't have those sensory issues?

My husband has difficulty hearing things when he is thinking about/doing something else, like you describe. I think shaking him would work but speaking to him just doesn't get through.

I'm the opposite, I have a lot of difficulty filtering out sounds and trouble thinking and concentrating when there is noise going on. I just can't choose not to hear something. If there is a lot of background noise or multiple conversations (eg in a restaurant) I can't hear any of them and they all just blur together in a wordless roar. I haven't been assessed with anything but my husband has. I think it's safe to say that people on the spectrum fall to both sides of this scale as with other traits.

It seems like you do have those sensory issues, just not the same way of coping with them. I'm a shouter too, and for me it can be over too much movement just as much as too much noise. I also tend to go into that hyper-focus you describe, but I swing back and forth between being distracted by every little sight and sound and being unable to see or hear anything besides what I am focused on. I read somewhere that both are normal, as is the swinging back and forth.

My partner describes my behavior in public places as "Don't bother me, I've almost memorize the genome of the ring-tailed--oh look, that's shiny."

I think that hyperfocus is one of the most prominent traits of autism. Autistic children who appear to have sensory hyposensitivities, like not hearing noises around them, are probably just hyperfocused away from most sensory stimuli. I would put your hyperfocus in the pro-autism column instead of the con.