Hearing your name, not being able to respond...

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...or not even hearing it.

When I was a child, I was like "trapped" in music in my head and colours. As an example once (age 4) I went on vacation with my family and I was lying in the back of the VW-bus and I heared my parents calling my name, but I was so "trapped" in the music and colours, that I just could not respond, so I remember them saying : "She's sleeping", but I was not sleeping at all. So they left somewhere without me. This happend a lot, also in school, that I realized my name, but was not able to "go out of my world" and be responsive. The worser was, that people told me: "I called you for three times" and I didn't realize it at all. They said: "Come back to this planet." But I don't do it on purpose, this things are just happening. At the age of 28 I got conscious about it, and from that moment on, I try to be "hyper-alert" when being with other people, because I realized, that I was often not participating at all, but it is very exhausting to "watch" myself to "stay", and I am very easily distracted still, but I have improved, though I don't see many people anymore, so that might give me the feeling, that I have improved.

Can you react quickly to your name? Did you improve this ability? Was there a difference between being a child and being older = from being a teenager on?

I rarely responded to my name being called when I was a child. For me, the reason was not an inability to respond due to being trapped inside my mind, but because the sound of my name was not recognized to have any meaning beyond the sounds themselves, so lacking any meaning whatsoever, there was no reason for me to do anything in response. On the outside, I looked like I had not heard anything, because I did nothing in response, no speaking, no looking, no turning, no reaction. At other times, I was too hyperfocused on what I was doing to hear any sounds at all, so that was another reason for not responding to my name.

Eventually, I figured out that people wanted to interact with me when they called my name, so I responded when I heard. This turning point was around age 10. As an adult, the funny thing is that I often call other people by name completely randomly when I have nothing to say to them and not intending to interact with them at all.

Edit: I don't see many people either, and I find that not seeing many people is an excellent way of "having better social skills".

Thank you, btbnnyr.
It is somehow strange "having a name", though I know everyone has a name and it is logical to have one. I still analyse it somehow, that this couple letters mean "me", though I know it is my name. I often write it down and just look at it and think "These letters are my name"...

Is the avatar-picture your cat? I have one, which looks very similar to it! She has only two more brown dots, one next to the nose and one on the chin.

i listen to my ipod 24 hours a day and my parents always talk to me, even when they know i have my earphones in. they know im not listening to them, but yet they keep talking.

I wish that it were my cat, but alas, my mother won't let me have a cat, and I live with my parents right now, and before that, I lived in apartment buildings that didn't allow cats. My cat avatar is from I Can Has Cheezburger. I looked through ~30,000 pages of cat pictures on I Can Has Cheezburger and decided that this cat was the qutest cat in there and needed to become my catatar. Hmmm, I may have a problem with perseveration.

Due to not responding to my name and ignoring her most of the rest of the time as well, my mother compared raising me to raising an unfriendly cat. You feed it, and it eats food, then goes away from you to its spread its hairs over everything, and you try to pet it, and it either hisses at you or goes away to lick itself over there, in the deep dark corner where its eyes glow in the deep dark and scare the beegeebus out of you when you are sleep-walking or herding your horde of zombies for a delightfully foodful evening of brrrainzzz consumption. Or something like this, yep yep yep.

Does your cat have the markings around her eyes like this cat? The markings look like the arms of a pair of glasses. I wonder if there is a name for them. The 10 Downing Street Cat, Larry the Chief Mouser, also has them and looks like this cat.

[img][800:600]http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/pb-110428-downing-street-cat-eg-02.photoblog900.jpg[/img]

I talked today with my psych about the hand-writing-issue (you know the other thread?) and she says it is not due to autism, but due to attachment-disorder, which can also happen to an autistic child, because also autistic children need attachment, even though they don't display it the same way as normal children. And in the handwriting-issue shows, that there is "attachment" missing, because you don't know where to turn to.



My cat looks still different and more like your avatar. I am not on my pc and I have to go to bed now, but I give you a photo tomorrow, if I can convert it to the right size, because I already wanted to post a picture, but it didn't work out

hmm not sure....

Kids thought I was deaf when I was eight because I often didn't respond to my name. The thing was I didn't hear my name being called. I was too focused on something else like absorbed in my own world, I didn't notice my name was being called until they would say "Beth, are you deaf?" That's the only year I have ever noticed it. I am sure I had done it before that but I wasn't aware until that age and I thought it was something new.

I noticed a lot of small children don't respond to their name. I never knew it was another ''Autistic thing''. The other day on the bus two toddlers came rushing onto the bus, and their dad went to pay the fare but then realised they were on the wrong bus, so he called the little boys over but they didn't respond at all. Well, one of them looked round but chose to ignore him, and the other one was too busy mucking about and being interested in sitting on a seat then anything else. The dad called their names again but they still didn't respond, so he had to come and take them out of the bus. But maybe typical kids do it just to be naughty or awkward?

Thank you for answering.

I cannot say, if this is "another autistic thing", it is one thing, how I experience being autistic. With me, it didn't stop after being a child. When I got to know my partner (same special interest), he would regulary took me to meet his friends. I would be sitting in a corner "trapped" with classical music in my head, "dissecting" it into pieces, like how would only the cello sound like or any violin and repeating it again and again. I would also "compose" in my head. That would take sometimes three hours. I didn't realize, others were speaking to me, if my partner wouldn't touch my arm. But I never really knew, what to say. So they stopped talking to mee as well. They told him, that I was weird and it took me a long time to realize those things. I must admit, that I never really tried to "connect" to people, I have always been on the outside, but that was and is just my reality. And I am used to it, that people call me "weird" and "alienated".

btbnnyr, I don't have a program to convert the photo to the right size, so I cannot put it here.

I have always heard it when my name was called but I also didn't respond and later still didn't respond regularly to my name until age 10/11+.

At first, a certain amount of the words that I heard didn't get processed right. I heard people talking but their sentences were full of "holes" with gibberish that I heard just fine but that didn't mean anything to me. Sometimes my name was one of those "holes". It didn't concern me (it was normal to me after all, I didn't know it was supposed to be different).

When I tried (especially if someone would made it explicitly clear that they addressed me), I understood more but I remember there being a delay between having heard what had been said and having understood it.

Besides that there was another reason for this. I hear my name but I don't intuitively feel/think that my name being called means I should pay attention or respond because others expect something of me. It's a concious process which is usually so fast that it almost seems to be intuitive but it's definitely an active thought-process.

Huge difference. If important, I can usually force myself with utmost concentration and exhausting/painful effort to respond. It#s unnatural but just responding people is unnatural anyway.

It doesn't work like that with friends and family though because around them, I'm more inclined to not make myself ill with trying so hard to fight against communicational limits or rather "quirks" of my autism. Naturally, they're a lot more used to my autistic behaviour than random strangers who take someone's quirky appearance to mean that they're "trash" or "stupid".

Thank you for sharing your experience, Sora.

I did some research on this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6509469.stm
http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/161/4/378.pdf?ck=nck

But there is much more to find about it on the Internet.

This is one of my major issues.

My cousin says he YELLED and YELLED at me in a parking lot, years ago when he randomly saw me walking and that I even looked at him and didn't respond.

I don't remember any of it.

But most of the time, I have to make sense of words that are randomly spoken. Once I'm IN a conversation I'm in "speaking mode', if you will.

Otherwise, it's like words take on the quality of my surroundings.

So, if I'm listening t music, I will be trapped din the music, like you said.

Otherwise, it's almost like the words are just...air. I have to put them together and I can't respond immediately to someone who just pops up out of the blue asking me something.

My son doesn't always respond to his name either. He will sometimes but most times he is just too busy with what he is doing. But I am guessing this is normal for a baby. Autistic babies never ever respond to their name and normal babies do but not all the time.