[throwawaysixthg]

Same problem. Hearing so good in quieter environments that it seems impossible to some people, and totally unable to make out a single word in a typical bar or club or party etc.

I’ve always thought it had something to do with undiagnosed ADD, or maybe more likely some autism spectrum disorder (though I never understood why medical professionals felt the need to label something that feels to me mostly like a few commonly coexisting personality traits and is not a source of any medical adversity for me a “treatable disorder”, so I’ve always rejected this).

I also have problems with alarms and sirens. I’ve walked down many miles of city blocks in my life, and I’m the only person I’ve ever seen who has to put down everything they’re holding and cover their ears with both hands any time an emergency vehicles drives by. That makes me enough of an outlier that I think there’s probably something medical to this, I don’t know what though.

[gambiting]

Huh, the bit about emergency vehicle sirens is weird - because I'm exactly the same. If an emergency vehicle is driving past I have to cover my ears or otherwise it's just...painful? I've never seen anyone else do this.

[throwawaysixthg]

Interesting! I’ve never seen anyone else do it either.

It’s similar to pain but it’s more like a sensory input at a level of intensity that is so overwhelming that it feels like it is or could cause permanent physical harm to whatever in my ear is receiving that input.

I guess I just described pain, but it feels a little different because the sensory input itself is the source of it, it’s not a side effect of anything else that’s happening, and it doesn’t really feel similar to any other kind of pain.

Fire alarms do this to me too. I lived in a building with false alarms every few weeks. I would like to have ignored them and continued working, but it is just impossible. I have to cover my ears and wait for the pauses between sounds to even do anything with my hands, like unplug a laptop or open a door.

[anotherevan]

You might want to investigate a condition called hyperacusis.