[caeril]

Objectively, my hearing is just fine. I can hear frequency sweeps and tones perfectly well, but all my life I've been unable to pick out words in conversation if there's even moderate background noise. "What?" is likely my most commonly uttered phrase.

This leads to people constantly telling me to get my "hearing checked", when it's not the ability to hear tones that's the problem.

Rather irritating explaining this to people.

[phaedrus]

I have the same issue. Worse, when I did get my hearing checked, the supposed test for difficulty picking up speech against background noise was terribly and obviously flawed. They used a very short (few seconds) clip that looped. My brain quickly learned the loop and subtracted it. What I can't do is filter out unpredictable background noise. Plus the lab is an idealized environment without distractions.

Want to accurately test it? Put me in the lobby of your hearing center with a wall phone and try to have a conversation with me, it would be immediately apparent. Of course they won't do that (too many uncontrolled variables) but they could at least try to make the test more lifelike.

It's very frustrating because I feel like if I could get a formal diagnosis I could ask for accommodations at work like not using the telephone for support calls (email and instant message instead).

It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening).

I feel like if I could say up front, "I have a diagnosed condition that affects my hearing," I could avoid a lot of problems and confusion. Unfortunately I can't seem to get a diagnosis.

[TeMPOraL]

I hope you'll get your diagnosis eventually.

> It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening).

I feel for you. This reminded me of my recent discovery. You've probably seen this[0] image test circulating on social media the other day. Few days ago, when working with my wife through some issues between us, I showed this to her. To my utter disbelief, she scored 6. I score 2. 3 on a good day. Suddenly, both of us realized why we're getting annoyed with each other whenever talking about things like remodelling the kitchen, rearranging the living room, or planning the layout of a new flat. As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head. And she now understands that I really do need to measure everything and drop it into CAD software before I'm ready to talk.

All because of a simple test that I only remembered because I've been obsessed with my aphantasia for over a year now. This makes me wonder: how many of such undiagnosed differences of perception are there between couples, that make living together difficult, because neither side can understand the other truly perceives the world differently?

--

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...

[existencebox]

This is something the wife and I have had many conversations about as well.

It sounds like we have an inverted situation to yours, where I was lucky to have a similar capability for visualization and spatial sense as your wife. This frustrated my wife and I to no end as she'd be driving the car and I'd say "you know you're basically riding the shoulder" and she would legitimately not realize the car was not centered. (To be clear, not from lack of attention, but from over-judging the distance from the left lane.) We had similar snips to your point about "can't you just visualize it in your head" (As it turns out, no, but I had trouble wrapping my head around that at first.)

For almost a decade this just ended up in recurring irritation and arguments whenever we drove together, until, and kinda to the point of the GP, we realized I _cannot differentiate dark objects on black backgrounds_, despite otherwise excellent visual acuity and response times. This may sound orthogonal to the car story, but to your point, after many inverses where she'd tease me about "well maybe you can't find your shirt just like I can't find the center of the road" we started to ask "wait maybe we both actually just really suck at this one class of task."

It's not quite as stark as the "can't visualize 3d fields" to be clear, but it was still a moment of "wait, we've just been living in completely different perceptual universes for a long long time now." (E.g. we'd be in a dark room, I'd walk into a wall or be unable to find anything, she would think I was making a bad joke or being obtuse.)

I tend to believe that this runs so so so much deeper than we know, and have made it the subject of some sci fi shorts that I've been hacking on. (That our mental models, ways of reasoning about the world, perceptions of reality, are truly distinct, the whole "what if what you think is green is blue to me" conundrum; and what happens when rational decisions coincide in pathological ways given varying, but individually rational and internally, although not externally consistent, perceptions)

[randomdata]

> As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head.

Here I would have told you that I can visualize everything in my head... until I took the test – definite 1. I can visualize everything in some loose sense, but it is encoded differently. Like, to use a poor analogy, a computer can represent an image as binary digits. I can understand 6 in my mind. Perhaps I took the test too literally?

[TeMPOraL]

Nah, you have to take it literally. You score 6 if you can - while awake - conjure clear, colorful images in your head on demand, that you can manipulate. Based on my reading on the topic and talking with my wife, it's very close to arbitrary rendering in your field of vision.

With my score of 2, I also "encode differently". I can sort-of work with imaginary visual data in my head, but it feels like - excuse the bad analogy - like looking into a debugger hooked up to a program that tries to render something. I am aware of an imaginary object, I can manipulate it symbolically. I can stack transformations in my head, like "it's rotated horizontally", "and also on the other axis", and "it's red", but most of my manipulations happen at this symbolic layer. The rendering pipeline goes nowhere; if I focus, I can sometimes force an unclear image to appear briefly.

[randomdata]

Fascinating. In an earlier life I worked as a graphic designer and always felt I had a keen ability to accurately visualize the art in my head before putting pen to paper, so to speak. But never like having a canvas in front of me, definitely more symbolic like you describe.

I'm not sure I can completely relate to your experience with needing CAD, other than I've noticed that sometimes the real world is flipped to my mental model, which can lead to funny results when my actions are backwards. I can usually 'visualize' things like that, at least in some abstract sense.

Well, that is, except specifically when it comes to my bother and father. They can somehow explain things to each other and know exactly what they are talking about with ease, as if they have some kind of telepathic link. They can say the exact same thing to me and I'll have absolutely no clue as to what they are talking about until they draw a picture. Now you have me curious to know if they are able to score 6.

[vpretzel]

As someone who has been profoundly Deaf since infancy, i found your description of auditory testing to be spot on.

I am not an expert by experience but what you have described sounds like a possible Auditory Processing Disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder). Experts in this disorder are very limited but there are strategies available for managing APD. However there is rarely a silver bullet for hearing disorders.

[anigbrowl]

That's a bummer. It's extremely unfortunate that the moat of medical training serves as an excuse for audiologists to not listen to sound engineers; they tend to end up with excellent understanding of the human ear but very little of the underlying physics.

[kordlessagain]

Do you have echoic recall?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory

[pkaye]

Have you done hearing testing? How well did you do on the word recognition tests?

[mrspeaker]

I was wondering the same - I was a concert once, and was putting in earplugs - when I noticed one ear wasn't affected as much as the other when I put the earplugs in.

Testing showed I had some hearing loss - but not a lot. I ended up getting more tests. They played a series of words into my "good" ear and I had to repeat them: "duck"... "duck". "concrete" .... "concrete"... it was pretty funny.

Then they did the same thing in my other ear: "schmwaaa" ... "Smchmwaa?"... "Grunnnngch"... "wtf?!". Turned out I had an accoustic neuroma - a tumor on the auditory nerve. Got it cut out with some neurosurgery, but now am 100% deaf in one ear with shitty tinnitus.

Hearing loss is pretty common so I don't want to scare-monger - but, OP - follow up on the tests!

[Jemaclus]

(Source: I am profoundly deaf.)

Hearing loss isn't only about volume and "hearing". It's also about understanding. When you get a hearing test, they aren't just testing frequencies. They'll also ask you to repeat back words that are said to you. There IS treatment for this, and you may actually benefit from a hearing aid or some other device that would help.

Your insurance should cover a hearing test! Just get it! It's pretty painless and kind of fun. Worst case scenario? They tell you your hearing is fine and you're back where you started.

Good luck!

[rhubarbcustard]

Sounds like you have Auditory Processing Disorder. You might be able to train yourself to do better in noise with something like https://neurotone.com/lace-auditory-training-program

[StrictDabbler]

The course is $99, the diagnostic test package they've linked is $176.

That's a high entry price for something so similar in concept to the brain-training snake-oil schemes that used to be sold in the back of magazines

[EB66]

I have the same problem. A lot of people do. For me, it developed during my 20s. My mother is a speech language pathologist so the problem was identified early.

What you have is a hearing discrimination loss. It's often caused by diminished hearing of higher frequencies. Hearing aids can help or if the loss of higher frequencies is total, then frequency-transposition hearing aids may be needed. Learning to lip read can also help a lot too.

Other people without hearing discrimination loss have probably experienced what it's like if they've ever listened to a cheap TV with crummy internal speakers and had to turn on subtitles. Very high frequencies on cheap speakers are often diminished or distorted. That makes it much more difficult to discriminate spoken words even though you can hear them fine.

If you haven't done so already, go get your hearing tested by a quality audiologist (there is such a thing as a bad audiologist). It can help identify exactly what's going on and give you a good baseline to compare against tests in the future (these things often get worse with age).

[quercusa]

This sounds like the 'Cocktail Party Effect', which usually gets worse with age. I've started to experience it in restaurants with lots of hard surfaces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

[4ad]

I have the same problem. As an additional data point, I have no problem hearing the dialog in documentaries, youtube shows, "casual" TV shows, etc, but I am having a very hard time understanding the dialog in movies and more serious TV shows.

[frompdx]

It seems like around 2000 dialogue in movies and TV shows started to get quieter and quieter while action sequences got louder and louder. It's awful. I am hearing impaired and I watch everything with subtitles, however, I really don't have an issue with intelligibility of dialogue while watching older shows and movies.

[layoutIfNeeded]

That's because older movies were mastered for stereo instead of surround sound. If surround sound is downmixed to stereo, extra care must be taken to compensate for the loss of spatial information, otherwise the dialogs get overwhelmed by the sound effects from the surround channels.

[forgotmypw17]

Anecdotally, I,ve been able to improve significantly on this by training myself to pause for a second or two before the ,,what?,,

If I give my brain that time to catch up, it,s able to put context and sound together into meaning most of the time.

[DoreenMichele]

This sounds like an auditory processing disorder. I have delayed understanding of words when I'm really exhausted, wrung out or sick. It's not a hearing issue. It's a brain issue, basically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder

[warent]

It sounds like it could be an attention issue. Have you been evaluated for ADHD?

[amelius]

Are you taller than most people around you?

[kordlessagain]

What's the theory behind this question? If someone is taller, one could assume the sounds from other conversations are traveling further (across heads) to the ears of the tall person?

[amelius]

If you're taller and standing in a group, it's more difficult to get visual cues (e.g. seeing people's lips move), and you are further away, and people generally don't make an effort to speak in your direction.