You must log in or # to comment.
I walk into a room and hear things. I hear lights and fridges, heaters, cellphones vibrating on floors above me. It’s a cacafony of endless clicks and ticks and humms and beeps and whirs that seemingly no one else notices.
Cats make good sounds though. The merps and meeps and jorps and mreeps and mrops and purrs are nice.
Its existence isn’t settled science, but I have this too and I’ve found that Auditory Processing Disorder describes it perfectly. Lots of comorbidity with autism and ADHD, so it’s possible it’s not a separate disorder but just another manifestation.
But yeah, I can’t filter out background noise at all. My brain copes by completely shutting off audio processing when I’m focusing, but it’s involuntary and can be pretty inconvenient. I have to read lips a lot when talking anywhere but a quiet environment because I can’t separate speech from background noise.
The worst is the whine from cheap chargers and power banks. Ive resorted to buying a few of my coworkers new/ better chargers in order to give myself some peace.
Try firing up a CRT display. I’m 40 and I can still hear that fucking electronic whine from several rooms away.
The trick is to put a tiny dummy load on the USB charger. Just buy the cheapest USB cable, cut the end off, and solder (or twist) a resistor between red and black. Boom.
Had a whiny USB power strip at my office desk that stopped whining when my phone was plugged in. Small resistor took care of that perfectly, cheaply, and nondestructively. Got a kick out of confused colleagues asking why I had a dangly cable plugged in with nothing but electrical tape on the end.
I’ve a friend who has nothing but IKEA TRÅDFRI lightbulbs. Each and every one of these has a subtle coil whine, and stepping into his home is like stepping into a rainforest, but unpleasant. He doesn’t hear a single peep from them, but to me it’s hella grating. The noise changes depending on what light it’s emitting, as well as the brightness. The worst is when the light is off.
I knew the scanner had failed before anyone tried using it because I heard it start making a high pitched whine.
Or knowing precisely what point people are attempting to make five words into the first sentence and then politely having to sit there and wait for the next five minutes while they laboriously meander their way through it.
How about being a witness to a conversation between two others and you can tell neither of them understand the point the other is trying to make.
Bonus points for when they actually agree with each other but just haven’t put together what the other is saying.
I love that actually. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does I go “hold on, A, you’re trying to say x, but B understands y, whereas B tries to say v and you understand w”
Always leads to the most flabbergasted double stare when they realize I’m 100% right and they’d have talked past each other for hours.
Sometimes with an undertone of “but I wanted a fight” by one of them.
I can’t do it. I try so hard but I interrupt every time and then they say “that’s not what I mean will you let me finish” then I have to sit quietly while it was exactly what they meant.
It’s critically important to develop patience here in order to deal with people getting older and taking this to the next level
My mom is a great person whom I dearly love but she’s fallen into the stereotype of old people rambling. Nothing is a simple question or statement anymore. It’s always a long meandering story with lots of detours
This is a dangerous “skill” to have, though. Very easy to slip into the trap of assuming you know what they’re talking about, only to have them end on a different point than you expected and then suddenly you’re responding to a point they never actually made
That would be nice, but I can’t remember the last time that happened.
That’s probably cause you do it without noticing
I have double powers as I’m neurodivergent and grew up in a highly traumatic household so you learn to pick on tiny signs that it’s about to pop off. Feel my life is fight or flight at all times.
Entire too relatable. I grew up in much the same way. Having that feeling as my baseline, my “normal”, made everything else feel wrong, but I could never fully put my finger on why. I developed a sense of stoicism so that I could get through each day showing as little outward reaction as possible. However, I confused that stoicism for calmness and stability; inside my mind everything still roiled as my instincts and senses were always watching and waiting, preparing for the next time things became dangerous.
Decades of living with that level of hypervigilance paired with the effort needed to put forward a stoic exterior has worn me down. The physical symptoms of chronic mental and emotional exhaustion are debilitating; the body really does pay a toll for the mind’s wounds. Maybe if twenty years ago I had the knowledge and resources that I do now, I could have done something to stave off what I’m going through.
All this to say: if you aren’t already, please seek counseling as soon as possible. Don’t make the same mistake I did; just like the smoker who denies that their habit it harmful, if you don’t work to heal your psychological wounds now, then it will eventually catch up to you. Be well, and take care of yourself.
Hello my friend.
CPTSD & HP => knowing what people are going to do. But if you act on it people think you’re some sort of stalker, creep or manipulator.
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but what is HP in this context?
Haut Potentiel or High Potential (I guess) in english.
People who can think in a specific way (some say treelike, or like a statistics cloud, getting access to information, but not only “if a gives b, and b gives c, then a gives c”) and have relatively high intelligence.
No problem about the grave digging 😁
Is it the same as sourdoué?
Yess (I guess, maybe it’s not a perfect translation).
Thanks!
If you’re french or reading french this might be of interest.
give an example?
Dudes, why all the downvotes?
Thats pretty difficult as its almost like intuition. Your brain has learned about these micro signals and must picks up on vibes.
Just describe the situation
I can’t speak for OP, but in my case I could tell how “bad” a day was likely to be based on small clues that most people wouldn’t see. Tiny things like a slight increase in the pitch of a parent’s sigh, how quickly keys were put down as they came through the door, the position of their shoulders as they picked up a dinner fork. How the almost invisible deepening of the creases around their mouth and eyes matched the increasing tension in the air. Instantly knowing by the timbre of the footfalls climbing the stairs if I needed to pretend to be asleep.
Growing up in an abusive, trauma-inducing household fosters a talent to sense the proverbial “blood in the water,” and how likely it is to send the sharks into a frenzy.
The worst part is when you try to gently warn people, and they look at you like you’re the crazy one—only for the exact thing you predicted to happen five minutes later.
Nah, the worst part is when they gang up to say it’s your fault even though you were the one warning them and not participating in whatever happens
The part that depresses you is that somehow it’s your fault for noticing it sooner and not trying hard enough to convince others.
give an example?
Where the PATRIOT act ended up
Where GWOT ended up
Where the dotcom and housing bubbles ended up
Where the ai bubble is going to end up
I joined a large friend group that had been together for 7 or so years. There was a person that I noticed would tell different people slightly different versions of stories. Normally I’d dismiss these as white lies but I noticed a pattern. The person in question saw relationships as transactional and I highly suspected that these white lies revealed a much deeper penchant for emotional manipulation.
I tried to warn some people that I thought I could trust within the friend group, but this upset some people and I had the step way back. After all, who is the new person to come into this group and fuck things up? I kept my mouth shut and out of the drama as I had to watch this person build a giant rift within the group.
Thankfully a few people had finally remembered the warning I had given years before and started comparing notes on the stories this person had told everyone. In the end I was vindicated when people started confronting the lies, but a lot of people had to go through therapy for the years of suffering that person caused in the meantime. I’m not giving too many details, but it got bad: suicide attempts, cops, legal battles. I had to just sit there and watch it all.
I think the actual worst part about this is that pattern recognition isn’t supposed to be a neurodivergent thing. Pattern recognition is like a built in feature in humans, but most people have it beat out of them in school
Pattern recognition is like a built in feature in humans, but most people have it beat out of them in school
Like so much else, it’s a trained skill. You don’t have pattern recognition beaten out. You just aren’t so heavily invested in a subject that you get it stamped in.
It’s not as though we’re born with the ability to hear Morse Code, for instance. You have to develop an ear for it.
It’s also a double edged sword, especially when you queue in on a pattern without understanding the reason behind it. Plenty of patterns are purely coincidental.
Picking out a “message” in a series of sounds doesn’t mean the dish washer is talking to you.
I thought that’s part of the reason we excelled as a species, seeing the patterns to eat or run from and knowing which is which. Plus getting curious about new ones and if they dont eat us figuring out what to do with them.
God help you if you need to convey the pattern you recognize though, then language as a tool will escape your grasp
I use a lot of hand gestures to make up for it. It does not help at all.
Or it doesn’t escape your grasp but it gets actively ignored by people who see your eccentricities as being indicative that you’re less than them. Including other autistic people.
But then the reality starts striking exactly how you laid it out but by that time you’ve already submitted your two weeks notice.
Not sure of their intended reference but: Cassandra in Illiad esp Trojan Horse incident Legolas, LotR, and many other Elves in Silmarrilion and Apendices Various Atreides in Dune (though they can force people to listen, lol) I had the (mis)fortune of later viewing video of an incident where I “activated.” Atm it seemed to me a very long slow progression (like 10 seconds?) But video-wise it all played out in like a second. The other takeaway was that all the stuff that I saw as “obvious” was greatly exagerated in my perception, so it was obvious to me, but impossible to get neurotypicals to credit (even to want to do) the zoom in and slow motion analysis that would be needed. I found the experience very upsetting/isolating because it proved impossible to get people to understand my perspective.
I’m not going to lie- I understood none of this.
I go Prince-of-Persia/MaxPain. It has probably saved me sometimes, but mostly it just results in people thinking I’m a spaz.
…this has not helped my understanding at all lol.
I think their comment has two parts.
First, they’re saying that this is a longstanding trope in mythology and literature, the character who can see the future but isn’t believed, like Cassandra. Lord of the Rings isn’t my thing, but I assume they’re giving examples from there as well. Dune is kind of a digression, in that those characters could see the future by recognizing how patterns were going to play out, but there wasn’t any element of not being believed.
Second, they’re talking about being neurodivergent themselves, and having experienced this kind of pattern recognition prediction thing. They’re saying that once someone caught this on video. It’s not clear exactly what they predicted, but apparently, looking at the video, it’s still obvious to them what the cues were that they observed and used to predict whatever it was. I guess the people around them didn’t see it, and were mystified about how they knew to do whatever it was they did in response. They think that the others should be able to look closely at the video of the incident, maybe zoom in and play it at reduced speed, and understand how they recognized what was going to happen, because they could point out all these cues; but they’re frustrated to know that won’t happen. Subjectively they experience the situation as though it lasts much longer than it does in the video, as though time slows down, which they tried to explain by using video game references.
I call it Cassandra syndrome, and it fucking sucks.
You know why it is true? because a fucking neurotypical decoded that she deserves the title because she was married to one. No relationship with the myth, just that she hated her autistic partner and wanted to be the victim.
Sadly this describes every day of my life and has led to some serious, serious depression problems. Being able to spot things from miles out sounds pretty amazing on paper, but it’s really truly a special kind of hell when you can’t actually do anything about all the horrible, horrible things you see in the horizon. To anyone else who is also like this, I truly hope you shoulder it well. It is not an easy thing to live with.
I’m not autistic, but I hate it when other people just ignore the obvious things. Like come on. Is this the result of evolution? How did your lineage survive for this long?
Having to eat has to be my least favorite part of neourdivergence. “Oh, it’s been a few hours since eating and I really want to eat”
This cited phenomenon is not a particularly neurodivergent one. Pretty much everyone sees the train wrecks coming.
If you are neurodivergent, not everything about your life and how your mind works is defined by that.
Object permanence has to be me least favorite part of neurodivergence. “Oh I walked away from that tree but I know it’s still there.”
