Auditory processing

[Progster]

Following @interaural 's post on the thread about the recent channel 4 documentary in which (s)he posts a link to an article which describes two experiments conducted by Anna Remmington
A sound advantage: Increased auditory capacity in autism - ScienceDirect
I have found a video of the second experiment that Remmington describes, in which a phrase (I won't say what it is - spoilers!) is repeated throughout in a noisy room with conversations going on. Here's the video, you can try it for yourself.

I found it impossible not to hear that phrase! It is loud and repeats itself - how can one not hear it???

I believe that this also linked to auditory processing disorder (APD), in which people find it difficult to make out speech over background noise. This is a difficulty that I have always had. I also found an online test for that (I don't know how accurate these tests are, further testing would obvioulsy be needed to be sure of having this condition), it has a video and questions after it, the speech was very faint, much fainter than the background noise and I could barely make out anything at all, and then there are questions based on the speech one is supposed to have heard, but I hadn't been able to make anything, so my score was 0/5.

It's no wonder I struggled so much in that noisy classroom and in social situations! I can't cope with background noise at all!

I remember that when I was younger, a boss called me into her office and told her that I must be hard of hearing and that I should go for a hearing test. I'm not hard of hearing, that's not the problem - the problem is not that I can't hear enough, but that I can hear everything!

 

[Catana]

I couldn't make heads or tails of anything on the first video, whether I listened only to the women or focused on the men. When I focused on the men, I could tell something was being repeated, but couldn't make it out. Of course, the video was doubly impossible, since the accents are British. Having to interpret any non-American accent on top of trying to make sense of foreground when background interferes, results in a sort of unconscious "closing my ears."

The audio segment was a very poor way of trying to duplicate the experience of APD. But the description of APD was spot on.

 

[Suzanne]

I had to turn off! It felt like a ton of wires in my head suddenly going crazy and this is how it feels, in a room full of people.

As it happens, someone I know, who is an nt has trouble with his hearing. It seems either a small bone has a hole in it or too thin and for the last 6 month's, his hearing has got worse: what he described is very similar to what I experience when in a room full of people.

 

[Progster]

I had to turn off! It felt like a ton of wires in my head suddenly going crazy and this is how it feels, in a room full of people.

As it happens, someone I know, who is an nt has trouble with his hearing. It seems either a small bone has a hole in it or too thin and for the last 6 month's, his hearing has got worse: what he described is very similar to what I experience when in a room full of people.

Yes, it is not exactly comfortable hearing, I had to turn the volume down, and add hyperacusis to the mix - ouch!

 

[Progster]

I could tell something was being repeated, but couldn't make it out.

I found it hard to make out what he was saying, too. It sounded more like 'amgorilla' or something.

 

[KImi]

I'm not sure what difference the headphones make as I don't have an headphone socket on my laptop but I couldn't work out the speech once the background noise had started. I don't like noisy places. My home is mostly silent unless I want to watch a specific program and I watch with subtitles to help seperate the speech from the background noise in the program.

I think this was where the confusion was for me when I was younger cos certain sounds triggered severe reactions as a child (screaming for things like having to pass a drill in the road) I remember having absolute pitch and being able to reproduce many of my favourite TV theme tunes on a child's keyboard.

At some point though in my teens which coincided with my thyroxine been lowered I started struggling when there was several sounds. my first memory of this was been in the toilets and college and suddenly realising I couldn't hear the toilet flushing because the hand dryer was on and then someone walked in behind and I didn't hear the door (I usually could when there were no other noises). I found I couldn't make sense fo the teachers particuarly when they turned to face the blackboard and I'd copy of whoever was sat next to me so my parents got called in and told they thought I had hearing problems and I should go for an hearing test. I think at this time I was genuinely struggling due to my medication not being right so I did fail the hearing tests at that time. I didn't like wearing them as they made things sound even louder to trick people who'd check look behidn my ears to see if they were in the 'on' position I'd put flat batteries in! ..that way they blocked out more sound than they let in!

So is Auditory Processing Disorder a seperate thing to Autism? Isn't it part of being autistic or is it something else that alot of people with autism also happen to have? And what's the difference between APD and Auditory Neuropathy?

 

[Nervous Rex]

So, it's basically an audio version of this:

I heard noticed the guy repeating the phrase over and over in the conversation, but I couldn't make out what he said. After being told it's "I'm a gorilla", I could hear it clearly.

Generally, I have a hard time sorting out what's being said when two or more people are talking. If I'm trying to watch TV and someone speaks to me, I have to pause the TV so I can direct my attention to them. If I'm trying to listen to one person and someone else starts talking, I have to ask them to repeat what they said, because I couldn't focus on what they were saying with the other person talking.

 

[Progster]

So, it's basically an audio version of this:

I heard noticed the guy repeating the phrase over and over in the conversation, but I couldn't make out what he said. After being told it's "I'm a gorilla", I could hear it clearly.

Generally, I have a hard time sorting out what's being said when two or more people are talking. If I'm trying to watch TV and someone speaks to me, I have to pause the TV so I can direct my attention to them. If I'm trying to listen to one person and someone else starts talking, I have to ask them to repeat what they said, because I couldn't focus on what they were saying with the other person talking.

Yes, I've seen that one, too. Hard not to notice the gorilla!

So is Auditory Processing Disorder a seperate thing to Autism? Isn't it part of being autistic or is it something else that alot of people with autism also happen to have? And what's the difference between APD and Auditory Neuropathy?

From what I understand, it's a separate thing - one can have APD without autism, but it is common in people with autism. Auitory Neuropathy has something to do with hair cells not transmitting in the cochlea and consequent hearing loss, but APD has to do with how your brain processes auditory information.

 

[KImi]

Yes, I've seen that one, too. Hard not to notice the gorilla!

From what I understand, it's a separate thing - one can have APD without autism, but it is common in people with autism. Auitory Neuropathy has something to do with hair cells not transmitting in the cochlea and consequent hearing loss, but APD has to do with how your brain processes auditory information.

Thanks! .. I'd guess mine is more likely to be APD then. So with APD a person could still have hypersensitive hearing and hear sounds like maybe they could identify a sound as a bird singing outside (if no other sounds were present) but couldn't seperate someone speaking on TV from someone actually speaking to them who was in the same room?

 

[fairy_girl]

I heard some of it but by the time the men and women were talking along with the noise I had to turn it off. It just started sounding like a loud garbage compactor going.

 

[KImi]

Yes, it is not exactly comfortable hearing, I had to turn the volume down, and add hyperacusis to the mix - ouch!

Do you use 'sound blockers' when you go out to muffle loud environmental sounds? like those 'ISOLATE' earbud things or have a walkman on all the time etc?

 

[Progster]

Thanks! .. I'd guess mine is more likely to be APD then. So with APD a person could still have hypersensitive hearing and hear sounds like maybe they could identify a sound as a bird singing outside (if no other sounds were present) but couldn't seperate someone speaking on TV from someone actually speaking to them who was in the same room?

Yes, I think so - certainly, I can pick out individual sounds easily, but I find it hard to talk to someone when the TV is on and need to turn the sound off. I'm not an expert, I think that @interaural might be better able to answer that.

Do you use 'sound blockers' when you go out to muffle loud environmental sounds? like those 'ISOLATE' earbud things or have a walkman on all the time etc?

Yes, I often wear earplugs when I'm out to dampen sounds, or use an mp3 player to listen to music and drown unwanted noise out.

 

[Gracey]

3/5
For Jack and Jill but had to track her voice.
(Zoom in, focus, try to block other sounds and recognise her intonation.)


The men and women at a party -

I was instructed to listen only to the women which I did.
I could hear the men but I wasn’t listening.


Interesting stuff

 

[interaural]

So, this sort of stuff is pretty close to my special interest and also my work (so I'm trying not to out myself here). Apols for the lengthy post. I'm trying to answer questions about APD and hearing loss and explain Richardson's expt. I couldn't resist doing this by outlining how hearing works.

Hearing is a multi-layered process. Your ears detect sound, but also perform some low-level processing. Sounds are filtered into frequency bands and loudness is 'measured' in the ear. You could think of the ear processes as the bottom layer. If you are hearing several sounds at once, they are still all mixed up in the ear.

The ears send nerve signals to the brain (various parts of the brain). The brain does most of the work in hearing and listening. One of the first things the brain does is try to separate out the sounds into different sound sources. This is called streaming, and is the next layer up in the chain. An example is when we listen to someone speaking when there is some traffic noise in the background. We don't usually get mixed up and think the traffic noise is part of the speech. Our brains use a whole bunch of cues in the sound signals to separate the audio signal into a speech stream and a traffic noise stream.

Above the streaming layer are further processes, including those for source identification (so we can recognise and name sounds), those for language processing and those for emotional assessment.

Now, humans have very limited processing capabilities so they need a way to process one thing in their environment at a time. The attention mechanism gives you this. Your attention selects just one stream or sound source for you to consciously process. The dominant theory of attention says that attention works as a competition between a top-down process and a bottom-up process. The top-down process is you consciously choosing what sound source to listen to, like a searchlight picking out objects in a scene. The bottom-up process happens because some sounds catch our attention whether we want them to or not, like a crying baby or a sudden bang. Your attention can switch pretty rapidly from one sound to another, giving you the illusion that you are continuously aware of all sounds around you. (The same thing happens with vision.)

Auditory processing disorder is regarded by most hearing scientists as not very well defined - yet. It seems to be a dysfunction of either the stream-forming process or the attention process. People with APD can have trouble picking sounds out of a background sound, or seem to be more likely to be distracted by sounds.

Hearing loss (deafness, hard of hearing, etc.) is a problem with your ears. If you have a hearing loss then your ears just don't detect such quiet sounds as people with undamaged hearing. We know a lot about what can go wrong here, what causes it, and hearing aids can help restore some of it. We know very much less about problems higher up the processing layers.

Many autism researchers have suggested that attention works differently in autistic people. They usually frame this as a dysfunction - e.g. by examining whether autistic people are worse at screening out irrelevant sounds. Anna Remington has a different idea. She suggests that autistic brains have a greater processing capability. Her two experiments both consisted of a difficult listening task, hard enough so that by the end of it her participants were working at full capacity. Her neurotypical participants got maxed out at a lower level of difficulty than her autistic participants. In the conversation experiment, participants were told to listen carefully to the women talking. They were not told about the gorilla man. Most neurotypical people do not notice the "irrelevant" man talking about a gorilla. Most autistic people do. Remington suggests this is because we have more spare processing capacity. In other situations this might look like us being distracted by irrelevant information. She is suggesting that autistic processing stems from a strength, not a deficit.

 

[KImi]

So, this sort of stuff is pretty close to my special interest and also my work (so I'm trying not to out myself here). Apols for the lengthy post. I'm trying to answer questions about APD and hearing loss and explain Richardson's expt. I couldn't resist doing this by outlining how hearing works.

Hearing is a multi-layered process. Your ears detect sound, but also perform some low-level processing. Sounds are filtered into frequency bands and loudness is 'measured' in the ear. You could think of the ear processes as the bottom layer. If you are hearing several sounds at once, they are still all mixed up in the ear.

The ears send nerve signals to the brain (various parts of the brain). The brain does most of the work in hearing and listening. One of the first things the brain does is try to separate out the sounds into different sound sources. This is called streaming, and is the next layer up in the chain. An example is when we listen to someone speaking when there is some traffic noise in the background. We don't usually get mixed up and think the traffic noise is part of the speech. Our brains use a whole bunch of cues in the sound signals to separate the audio signal into a speech stream and a traffic noise stream.

Above the streaming layer are further processes, including those for source identification (so we can recognise and name sounds), those for language processing and those for emotional assessment.

Now, humans have very limited processing capabilities so they need a way to process one thing in their environment at a time. The attention mechanism gives you this. Your attention selects just one stream or sound source for you to consciously process. The dominant theory of attention says that attention works as a competition between a top-down process and a bottom-up process. The top-down process is you consciously choosing what sound source to listen to, like a searchlight picking out objects in a scene. The bottom-up process happens because some sounds catch our attention whether we want them to or not, like a crying baby or a sudden bang. Your attention can switch pretty rapidly from one sound to another, giving you the illusion that you are continuously aware of all sounds around you. (The same thing happens with vision.)

Auditory processing disorder is regarded by most hearing scientists as not very well defined - yet. It seems to be a dysfunction of either the stream-forming process or the attention process. People with APD can have trouble picking sounds out of a background sound, or seem to be more likely to be distracted by sounds.

Hearing loss (deafness, hard of hearing, etc.) is a problem with your ears. If you have a hearing loss then your ears just don't detect such quiet sounds as people with undamaged hearing. We know a lot about what can go wrong here, what causes it, and hearing aids can help restore some of it. We know very much less about problems higher up the processing layers.

Many autism researchers have suggested that attention works differently in autistic people. They usually frame this as a dysfunction - e.g. by examining whether autistic people are worse at screening out irrelevant sounds. Anna Richardson has a different idea. She suggests that autistic brains have a greater processing capability. Her two experiments both consisted of a difficult listening task, hard enough so that by the end of it her participants were working at full capacity. Her neurotypical participants got maxed out at a lower level of difficulty than her autistic participants. In the conversation experiment, participants were told to listen carefully to the women talking. They were not told about the gorilla man. Most neurotypical people do not notice the "irrelevant" man talking about a gorilla. Most autistic people do. Richardson suggests this is because we have more spare processing capacity. In other situations this might look like us being distracted by irrelevant information. She is suggesting that autistic processing stems from a strength, not a deficit.

Interesting, though some autistic people could still have processing problems so they wouldn't be able to distinguish the different speech or struggle to seperate it from the background noise?

 

[interaural]

Interesting, though some autistic people could still have processing problems so they wouldn't be able to distinguish the different speech or struggle to seperate it from the background noise?

Yes, sure, it would be possible to have APD and be autistic. Not sure if there is any reliable data on this. My daughter could probably get a diagnosis of both. She actually has a diagnosis of sensory processing disorder, but not autism. (Her psych says she would very likely receive an autism diagnosis if formally tested, but my daughter doesn't want to be.)

 

[Squished Crab]

After I finished listening I realized my heart was racing, I still feel stressed out and anxious. This is also how I feel in a room of people, very anxious and overwhelmed. I hear everything.

 

[tducey]

Yeah, I'm not 1 for background noises either. I'd rather there be just 1 or 2 noises at a time not multiple noises.

 

[Chance]

Had to turn it way down...

I can't seem to block noise, or seperate them once they start running together...

I understand it was a simulation, and I do believe they tried their best, but its still not like how I hear in real world... but it is sort of close. Certain pitches seem to take over, and it may be the background stuff I am hearing the most actually... So, I don't hear what someone is saying to me very well...

Different scenario... Remove the chaos and place it in music and all works very well. I can separate different instruments all throughout a song (if I like the song and can stay focused). If not it's just noise like everything else.

I think that is why I like very powerful type music that is distinct... Soft flowy overlapping music sometimes just irritates me, yet it soothes other people???

Video 1 .... The paper rattling, the cups clanking, the echoes, and the dude saying I'm a Gorilla 13 times... (I had to go back and count, it's just a thing with me)... This is the most of what I heard but it was all annoying as hell. The ladies were sort of muffled it seemed, and I really didn't notice anything they said, but the dude saying I'm a gorilla was like a bass drum... I know I was suppose to listen to the ladies but the dude over powered them... : (

Video 2... I got 2 answers Blue coat and the market... the rest was just noise. : )

 

[Chance]

After I finished listening I realized my heart was racing, I still feel stressed out and anxious. This is also how I feel in a room of people, very anxious and overwhelmed. I hear everything.

It more or less was just aggravating to me... it's like working to hear... or straining to see... Its tiring.