Lots Of People = Sensory Issues

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Dude, I always forget that being around lots of people makes me feel inebriated. Anyone else like that?

When I'm around large crowds, I am easily distracted.

When I am with one or two people and I have to engage verbally with them for any length of time, I often feel the need to retire to my car, turn up the music and SING REALLY LOUD. It's like there's all this tension inside and I have to let it all out. Weird, I know.

Know what you mean about the tension. That's why I like complex driving music like the Batman Begins score. It feels like it's a representation of what's going on inside of me.

Yes. I simply ignore the presence of others when there's too many to process. This results in me waliing around as if "in a daze", quoting from my grandmother when I was 14 walking into a KFC with a bunch of people inside; she kept complaining about the way I walked and looked throught the time I lived with her. All the sights and sounds from crowds make my thought proceses slow down.

I was just in a late night breakfast thing at my university cafeteria. There had to have been at least 600 people in that room. I was running on about 2 hours of sleep (mostly from a nap that I had picked up earlier), and between that and the ton of people, I really couldn't tell up from down. My depth perception wasn't there, and I couldn't focus on much and I kept having that swirling reality feeling like you get in dreams. Whoo. But I did get a really cool balloon hat out of it. It's an alien riding in an alien space ship hat.

I can relate to the driving music, I do the same (though with different music). My emotions have a soundtrack too, and like you said, it helps me externalize what's going on inside. Much of my music drives my husband nuts, lol

I find the the chattering of large groups of people is annoying and it makes me feel uneasy. Also, with the noise of lots of people talking I have a hard time understanding what other people are directly saying to me, even if I am really trying to listen.

Man I have trouble hearing what one person says to me a in a room with just the two of us, let alone a whole crowd. People get pissed at me, thinking I don't listen. I just can't hear words that great. Or, I guess, differentiate words that well.

When I cant hear people its usually because I cant pick up the "beat" to their words

Like the sentence above might sound like:

Wenni canhere peplitsus allybeca sei canpickup the beato forwards.

ANd I'm stuck saying "huh"???

Sometimes I can only understand other through their cadence as well.
On the other hand, those totally lacking cadence are easiest for me to understand.

ah when im around a lot of ppl, i become very agitated easily and aggressive, i hate when too many ppl are around me or near me, it drives me insane. I was at costco today on my ipod and a crowd of ppl surrounded me, and my mother was near, and i got upset, so i started pushing ppl out of my way, it was like i couldn't breathe. Luckily nobody cared that much, and i was able to regroup myself shortly after.

Jeeze, I learned after many years to avoid large crowds, I simply cannot comuncate to people when I am surrounded by a large noisy crowd and even worse trying to understand what the other person is saying to me. I find it impossible and sometimes its unavoidable so I do deal but its been a while since I have had to be surrounded by that many people to the point where I had a hard time, and I hope never again.

I find the cacophony of many people talking at once to be painful; it wears down my Sensory Issue Immunity (SII) bar rather quickly (I have such a bar in my mental HUD). And once that bar is gone, I tend to start behaving very badly very quickly.

Also, too many people is too much to track. In order to interact well with someone, I must invoke and maintain the appropriate human interactive construct, which is a mental machine that I use in an attempt to analyze and access the social queues that a more typical human understands intuitively, and to respond appropriately to the human at hand. Running one of these constructs is typically no problem, but running multiple constructs at once is very expensive and draining. Not to mention there are input problems for the constructs with multiple people, as I must observe subtle body language and expressions, tone of voice , etc., as data to feed the appropriate construct, and it becomes increasingly hard to do this on many people; i.e., senses become quickly overtaxed again. This has the rather singular effect of making me seem to have a high social IQ in one-on-one situations, but then seem socially ret*d when placed in a group of people.

Good fortune,

- Icarus just loves meetings...

I generaly hate crowds. They make me feel 'compressed' by all the noise and visual stimuli. Added to which people in a crowd seem to adopt the 'herd' mentality, so they are not paying attention to where or what they are doing.

Using a 1-10 trauma scale:

Being in an averaged-sized classroom, where there are a lot of people but the teachers
have them well under control: 2

Being around a small group of loud people:3

Being around a small group of loud people who have hillbilly accents or the shrill voices
of some African-American females at my school ("Oh no you DIDDEN, Juan! I whoop yo ass!"):5

Being in an averaged-sized classroom with a lot of students are talking amongst
themselves or doing group work:6 (my teachers send me in the hall all the time
because I start to panic)

Being in a cramped classroom with the conditions above:7

Any situation in which several people start yelling over each other:7

I am wading through a crowd. Stranger's bare arms are brushing against mine:8

Sporting events:9

That happens to me all the time. Luckily, this year, I've made friends with a lot of foreign exchange asian people. So they talk slower and don't mind when I have to ask them to repeat themselves.