Filtering out irrelevent auditory stimuli: Strategies

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I saw a neuropsychologist today, I have summarised some of the points we discussed about filtering out irrelevent background noise. Note that these relate to my experiences, I am not able to generalise them, however the info might help others.

Problem: Signal to noise ratio. All sensory information enters the brain, this is transferred into neural patterns that compete with eachother, the brain selects the dominant neural patterns to focus on. It should extract relevant information and suppress the rest. In my case this doesn’t happen very well and my attention is continually jumping, making it hard to focus on whatever I want to be focusing on (e.g. studying etc.).
Strategies to improve by increasing signals and reduce distractors
- Attach importance to things I want to focus on with emotion (positive emotions are associated with reward, negative emotions with punishment)
- Learn to not associate negative emotions/thoughts with background noise through meditation exercises
- When I need to focus on something, try and be in a familiar environment where brain can predict sensory input
- Use salience to emphasise what I am trying to concentrate on
- Use headphones to drown out noise or provide a predictable distraction from unpredictable distractions.
- Reduce potential workplace distractions
- Schedule so brain learns that this is time to focus.

Problem: Sometimes the patterns from different auditory sources will compete to the extent that they merge, resulting in difficulty distinguishing which sounds are of importance (e.g. which sounds are made by the person talking and which are background noise)
Approach: In group situations look at the person who is talking, and try and focus on only one person who is talking at a time.

Problem: Intermittent difficulty identifying spoken words, I hear sound and fail to automatically recognise the words that are being used, have to consciously break up sounds into words and mentally find the word that matches the sound pattern.
This was a puzzling one, the hypothesis is that because my brain is constantly working, stressed, overloaded with processing sensory input etc. areas are taking micro-sleeps, resulting in me having to process this information in a round about way. Approach is to give my brain more rest and not push it too hard when it is tired.

I often do this too, especially if I'm engrossed in something. I'm sort of aware that someone has just spoken to me but I don't know what they have said until I replay it back in my mind. Sometimes I have to replay it two or three times before one of the "distorted" words matches a known word that makes the sentence make sense.

I have all of these issues, especially with spoken words and determining which words come from one person.

I don't really get how to use these techniques in public. I do wear headphones but I'm fearing working again for this reason. I'll most likely in food service which is probably the biggest offender for this sort of thing.

I pissed my grandma off a little bit yesterday because she thought I wasn't listening to her, I have the issue with missing one word in a sentence. It just turns to complete rubbish somehow and I have to ask people to repeat themselves.

Yes I have problems with this too.
Especially when someone suddenly starts talking to me. Most of the time when I say "what" it's not because I didn't hear them it's because the sounds they make didn't register as words.

This is the worst part for me about having AS. The inability to filter out background noise has been by cure throughout my entire life. Some days it drives me to madness.

Right now I live a fairly noisy apartment complex. If it's not one thing it's another around here, the guy upstairs who walks really heavy and paces back and forth for extended periods of time, and if he's not pacing, he's playing his computer really loud. Then if it's not that, it's the DJ down the hall thumping his music for hours and hours. Or it's the constant construction noise form repairs on the building, or it's children running & screaming, or it's lawnmowers. It makes me friggin crazy!! ! I can barely get anything done.

But I will be looking for a new apartment soon. I'm definitely going to try to find a quieter spot.

Ecl713, expecially and tallyman, are there any factors that impact your tendency to fail to recognise sound as words? Like is it worse when you are tired or...

About the same. And like they said it's also when someone just randomly starts talking to me most of the time.

It's like I'm in my own head if I'm not talkign to people and I have to travel light years to get back to Earth O_O

So before I "come back" the words people say get lost somewhere.

Sometimes I do notice it's worse when I'm tired. But It's also a lot like EXPECIALLY said above. I wish when people want to talk to me they first say my name and then make sure that I'm there and not still of in my own head somewhere.
It's either there's too much info coming in all at once and I can't filter out the garbage or I'm so far gone that nothing gets in. There is no happy middle that NTs seem to have.

I have these problems too. I've felt that part of it was a focus issue and part sensory issue. For example, if I am watching TV and there is a tv on in another room my attention will go to the other TV although I'm staring at the TV in my room. I will miss parts of the audio from my TV as I try to bring my focus back. It ends up being an audio tug of war between the 2 TVs and it causes lapse in the audio information my brain processes.

Another example would be if I'm in a restaurant talking to someone and there are other conversations all around. I take in all of the data around me because I can't filter it and and the person that I am with sounds like they are speaking gibberish. But I also have a very clear sense of directional shift going on in my head; although I am looking in the direction of the person at my table my point of focus is bouncing all around the room, at a very fast rate, from 1 conversation or noise to one of the others. I just feel like I can't lock on to what I should be focused on. The whole thing is very tiring and I can't go to restaurants or other social places unless it's during off-hours when they have few people there.

I think there is something to what you said about micro sleep.

^This.

It's why I was originally Dx with ADHD - I don't know if the label still fits now I have an AS Dx.

Similarly, I was watching an iTunes U podcast of Dr Nancy Minshew who noted the difficulties of AS students with University lectures, as they require dealing with the visual input of the Powerpoint presentation as well as the auditory input of the lecturer. So add difficulty multitasking onto the difficulty of auditory processing, and I now understand why lectures are so hard for me.

Thanks for the post, Cogs, I'm going to try to implement some of these strategies too.

Do you have the name of the podcast so I can try and find it?

I have big trouble in lectures too and am trying to figure out how to make them work for me. One of the effective things I have found is wearing sunglasses and listening to quiet repetitive music through headphones. What have you found to make lectures eaiser?

I would be very interested to know how you find those strategies and also if you find any other strategies that help

The podcasts's called "The Cognitive Basis of Behaviour in Autism: Implications for Memory and Learning and Behavioural Intervention". It's under University of California Television, in the Collection "Health and Medicine (Video)".

Dr Minshew talks about demands on information processing just after the 1:00:00 point. She says: "A general problem in autism, no matter what domain you’re in is the limit in the capacity to process information, particularly if it was integration of information." She goes on to explain a study they found where young adults/teens were given a simple digit recall task and/or simple object tracking task. The Autistic group performed the same as age and IQ matched controls if they did the tasks seperately, but performance dropped 40% when both were to be done together (while NT's performance did not drop).

Dr Minshew goes on to say,
I take the latter to be equivalent to a Powerpoint presentation.


They sound like good ideas - the only problem for me is that there are now only about 10 people in the lectures I attend, so if I wore sunglasses and headphones it would look like I wasn't paying attention (which is ironic, since I'm not paying much attention anyway).

I'm closing in on my 10th year of Uni - there was no problem with my undergrad degree because I could afford to sketch/play tetris/fall asleep during lectures because I could just memorise the lecture slides later on for the exam. Now, though, with my current degree, this is no longer a possibility.

One thing that helps me is dexamphetamine, which I was prescribed when I was diagnosed with ADHD (I don't know if the Dx still fits). It doesn't make information processing easier in itself, but it does give me the energy to have my 'processing system' working at full speed. I still get exhausted, but it's easier to maintain that energy needed to rapidly switch focus between lecturer and Powerpoint presentation and actively ignore all other extraneous input.

Even with the drug, though, I'm still not getting the whole picture, so I get the lecture recording and work through it at my own pace. With each change of slide I need to pause the audio, read the slide, do my own reading on what the slide's saying and then listen to the audio to see if it matches up with what I now understand of the slide. It is highly effective, but as you can imagine also terribly time-consuming.


I'll let you know I'm due to start learning how to meditate next week with my psych. I'm also interested to know how you go with your 'approaches' list. There isn't really much info/support for these issues at Uni, especially if your coping mechanisms have essentially cheated you to some level of success.

This seems a lot like auditory processing issues, which is something I struggle with.

How do you cope with/improve them?