I often find myself reading something on the bus or subway, but then not understand anything I read. This seems to be because of the constant noises. Not even instrumental music helps, as that distracts me as well and also does not always match the theme of the book.
The best working one in noisy places seems to be white noise, with complete silence being the best overall. How do yall handle such situations?
I have industrial deafness, that is an audio processing disorder that is associated with background noise. This also affects my reading.
If there is any form of background noise, I can’t understand speech. Eg, if I turn the air conditioner on in the living room, then I can’t understand what’s said on the TV, even at reasonable volume levels. Turing the volume up can help, but not a lot.
If I’m standing next to the fridge and you walk up to talk to me, I can see your mouth moving, I can hear your words, but I can’t understand anything, the small noise of the fridge compressor completely wipes out my comprehension.
If we are in a busy cafe with lots of people talking at once, I can’t understand the staff when they ask to take my order, even if they are right in front of me, speaking clearly directly at me. It’s like my brain can only concentrate on the background noise and it has no processing power left to interpret foreground words.
This is the same with reading and writing. I am a software engineer, so I spend all day writing code. Many of my colleagues like to listen to music while they work. I cannot. If I put on music, then I can no longer write. Nothing comes out. My mind is blank, concentrating on listening to the music. Even instrumental background music affects me.
So to answer your question, I can’t read with background noise. Perhaps you could check if you have a form of industrial deafness too.
You know what, this explains all of the issues I’m having with understanding speech. Thank you for informing me this exists.
I have autism, and I always thought this was a symptom of my autism, but after researching it recently it seems that most others with autism are the opposite, they need background noise or music to concentrate.
It sounds a bit like Auditory Processing Disorder - pretty sure I’ve got this. Something I really struggle with is are lyrics in songs, I can hear that there’s words but I can’t understand them unless I were to stop what I was doing and really focus. To me, the sounds and pitches of the voices are basically just another sound.