6 ms·

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 o

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 6y ago
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_aphantasia_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...
- existencebox 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  > 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?
kordlessagain 6y ago
Do you have echoic recall? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory
anigbrowl 6y ago
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.
pkaye 6y ago
Have you done hearing testing? How well did you do on the word recognition tests?
- mrspeaker 6y ago
  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!
vpretzel 6y ago
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 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.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

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_aphantasia_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...

existencebox 6y ago
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 6y ago
> 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?

kordlessagain 6y ago

Do you have echoic recall? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory

anigbrowl 6y ago

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.

pkaye 6y ago

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

mrspeaker 6y ago
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!

vpretzel 6y ago

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 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.