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ecspecially in the cafeterria. most anoying thing ever ur just trying to sit down and eat. now its stuck in my head the voices

That's one of the reasons I avoid crowds, even small crowds. All the conversations around me can drive me crazy, makes it difficult to concentrate on anything. It all blurs together, yet I can hear every individual conversation. It's like my brain is trying to track every single one, then gets overloaded.

I hate this too!

It is like listening to a gaggle of geese in stereo on a farmyard.

The cacophony in my head! I need to get out of there ASAP and it is why I don't like crowded places. That and people keep bumping into me.

I also like to sit and eat in peace and quiet.

I also have this problem, along with sound and light sensitivity in general. It is a big problem when I am in cafeterias and restaurants.

It is not just the noise. White noise doesn't bother me much. It is the information in the noise. If I can understand the conversations going on around me, I am in big trouble. I start to shut down and go into a panic. It's like being in a room with a bunch of radios blaring, all tuned to different stations. Complete chaos.

My solution, when I can get away with it, is to listen to music through ear buds.

Interestingly for me, my sensory issues got much worse about 6 years ago when I quit smoking. I recently found an article that suggests that nicotine helps with sensory processing and focus.

Nicotinic filtering of sensory processing in auditory cortex.
Abstract
Although it has been known for decades that the drug nicotine can improve cognitive function, the nature of its effects and the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Nicotine activates nicotinic acetylcholine (ACh) receptors (nAChRs) that normally are activated by endogenous ACh, presumably "hijacking" the cholinergic contribution to multiple cognitive functions, notably attention. Thus, studying nicotine's effects helps to better understand a commonly used drug as well as functions of nAChRs. Moreover, nicotinic agonists are being developed to treat a variety of disorders that involve attention-related or age-related cognitive dysfunction. Studies have shown that nicotine can enhance processing of attended stimuli and/or reduce processing of distracters; that is, nicotine enhances attentional filtering. To examine potential mechanisms within sensory cortex that may contribute to cognitive functions, here we describe nicotinic actions in primary auditory cortex, where well-characterized neural "filters"-frequency receptive fields-can be exploited to examine nicotinic regulation of cortical processing. Using tone-evoked current-source density (CSD) profiles, we show that nicotine produces complex, layer-dependent effects on spectral and temporal processing that, broadly speaking, enhance responses to characteristic frequency (optimal) stimuli while simultaneously suppressing responses to spectrally distant stimuli. That is, nicotine appears to narrow receptive fields and enhances processing within the narrowed receptive field. Since basic cortical circuitry and nAChR distributions are similar across neocortex, these findings may generalize to neural processing in other sensory regions, and to non-sensory regions where afferent inputs are more difficult to manipulate experimentally. Similar effects across sensory and non-sensory cortical circuits could contribute to nicotinic enhancement of cognitive functions.

I'm not suggesting that anyone start smoking though.