I’ve been wondering whether there is a connection between my auditory oversensitivity and my inability to see nonverbal cues. I rely on my visual sense a great deal, and I experience the visual world with great intensity, so being unable to see nonverbals that are (apparently) right in front of me is very puzzling. It’s as though some obstacle were in the way.
I have read posts by other Aspies who say that they can see a person’s nonverbal signals all at once, but that they can’t understand the signals until later. These folks can replay interactions in their minds in order to view the nonverbals individually and interpret them. I envy Aspies who have this ability. When I’m interacting with a person, I don’t see any nonverbal signals of which I’m aware, so understanding these signals later is out of the question.
In last week’s ASL class, I began to get a hint of what might be the source of the problem. I was blocking out sound almost entirely, so I could not make out any words for the entire two hours. Because people were allowed to speak in the first two classes, some of them were taking the opportunity to ask a lot of questions. I couldn’t hear the questions, but my virtual deafness allowed me to observe people without any auditory distraction. All at once, I noticed that I was watching how one of my classmates used her hands and her facial muscles when asking a question. The inclination to watch felt intuitive, but my interpretation was on a wholly conscious level. I thought, “She’s moving her hands in such a way as to appear authoritative about what she’s saying. Her face gives me the feeling that she takes the subject matter of the question very seriously.”
I have no idea whether my interpretation was correct, but based on my previous interaction with the person, it was (at the very least) a good guess.
So, I got to thinking: Have I failed to see nonverbal signals all my life because I’ve been so distracted and overwhelmed by sound? As compelling as the visual world is to me, the auditory world commands my attention. Whether I’m listening to someone use a hammer, whisper in a movie theatre, or talk in a large group, my response is always the same: I can’t help but hear it, and I can’t help but be overstimulated and overtaken by it. It’s entirely possible that I’m not interpreting the nonverbals because my ears have been using up too much of my attention. Besides, because I’m always a click or two behind in a conversation, I’m spending so much time parsing the words that I haven’t got time for the nonverbals. And once I parse the words, the nonverbals that went along with them are already gone.
It’s also possible that my visual and auditory systems function in analogous ways. Just as I can hear everything very clearly, but can’t prioritize, filter, or interpret competing sounds, so I might also be seeing all the nonverbal signals very clearly, but can’t parse, separate, or interpret what’s right in front of me. When I walk into a large, noisy social gathering, I hear very little except pure, undifferentiated sound, and I overload immediately. Perhaps each person has the same effect on me visually: all the nonverbal signals get piled on top of one another until I see nothing except undifferentiated gestures and facial expressions whose cumulative impact is quite pronounced. After all, a face-to-face conversation can be an extremely intense experience for me. Perhaps I avert my eyes because I’m actually overloading on nonverbals.
If taking in undifferentiated sound has an impact, taking in undifferentiated nonverbals must have an impact as well. With sound, the result is auditory overload; with nonverbals, it seems to be empathic overload. Although I can’t parse the nonverbals, I have a very powerful experience of almost every person with whom I come into contact. I can feel the person’s mood and emotion. It’s a wonderful ability to have in a scary situation, but it’s very distracting when I’m just trying to go grocery shopping.
Some people would call this kind of intuition a sixth sense, and perhaps it is. In any case, I seem to have exquisitely acute senses that bring me information in ways that I don’t always consciously understand.
© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
great post and good reasoning. this one gets forwarded to friends and family
Hi Rachel. I’ve posted on this blog before, I think, under the name midwestcoast.
I wanted to say that this is a really cool post. It made me think and realize something about myself. I get overstimulated by both sight and sound. Sight to the extreme that I often don’t wear my glasses and prefer the world to be soft and blurry. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 8 years old, my eyes are relatively bad. I had never wondered before why it is that I do this…but I know that, for instance last semester in my pre-calculus class, when visuals were introduced that were neither words nor numbers, I would just sort of shut down and I wouldn’t be able to learn the material until I was at home where I could decipher the lesson in a way that I could understand it. I think that I must be more sensitive to sight…Sounds, little, tiny sounds that others don’t notice really bug me, but I don’t get overstimulated unless there is a great deal of noise.
I suppose, in a way, that my habit of navigating the world without full sight is somewhat similar to your approach with respect to sound.
Good post.
Hi Rachel,
A couple of months ago i began to wear earplugs on a daily basis. Since then, my ability to negotiate verbal and facial cues has improved – for the simple reason I am not in a state of sensory overload. I get overwhelmed on all sensory levels and I also have difficulty separating out sensory inputs from each other. What this means is that when i am more sensorially overwhelmed, I cannot easily classify or sort through or absorb or even understand which senses are in operation or how in fact i am being overloaded. (In this state, I might have a full bladder, but i will attempt to solve it by eating or drinking something! There is great confusion and a loss of ability to perform simple tasks or engage with others;) As I get more accustomed to taking responsibility for the severity of my sensory dysfunction, I am better able to remain in a comparatively relaxed state, and I am able to absorb more from the world. It is good to read this post.
still have your art here. just notoriously hopeless at getting to a post office to post it. it will happen.
“Besides, because I’m always a click or two behind in a conversation, I’m spending so much time parsing the words that I haven’t got time for the nonverbals. And once I parse the words, the nonverbals that went along with them are already gone.”
That describes very well the way that I perceive things to be. Add to it that I find it very difficult to look at people that I’m interacting with (yup – the old can’t look you in the eys thing), and I don’t have much hope of seeing things like facial expressions.
As someone so wonderfully put it (was it you Rachel?) – when I make eye contact with someone else I lose the ability to think…
I relate to this very well.
It is always interesting how you describe how you see and hear the world — an inside look at someone elses sensory abilities. I think we all have some sensory issues or social anxiety to some degree. Personally, as someone who is not autistic, I am shy and find it hard to absorb or process information in a classroom setting, the room seems to take me over sometimes…but I am aware that this happens to a lot of people–sometimes we all focus too hard on the people who don’t have these issues. Anyway, that woman in class using her hands to express herself, sometimes I do that when I’m dealing with a topic that I’m still learning, it helps some people focus.
I also liked the comment about earplugs, this would be an inconspicuous way to block out sound.
My experiences with nonverbal behavior parallel some of yours with sound, I think. (and so as not to seem like something I’m not to readers, let me mention I don’t have an autism spectrum diagnosis but I have some similar problems)
I take it all in, and I take it all in consciously. The problem I have is that I can identify what it means about the person talking to me – that they’re tired, or angry, or whatever – but I have much more trouble identifying what it means *for* the person talking to me or what it means for how I should respond.
So I might be able to tell that they’re angry, but not whether *they* know they’re angry, or whether they want me to acknowledge or respond to their anger. They might want me to politely ignore it, or they might want me to say something diplomatic and oblique like “what else could I do to make this work better?” If I respond to it too obviously, they might feel that I’m deliberately making too big a deal of it to imply that they’re showing an inappropriate emotion. If I don’t respond to it at all, they might feel that I’m purposefully ignoring them because I think their anger shouldn’t exist.
Etc., etc. What it comes down to is that I get a lot of nonverbal input that I don’t know what to do with, and often thinking about it doesn’t help, and takes attention and time that I could otherwise use to respond to things I actually know how to respond to.
I wish I could filter some of it out. I’ve had a therapist note that when I get very upset, I often stop looking at them and that may be to block out visual nonverbal cues. I don’t know how to just not notice it, though.
This makes a lot of sense and can also operate the other way round, where the visual information overwhelms the auditory. I experience auditory processing difficulties and had this investigated as a study participant. It was found that my auditory processing abilities, and those of a subset of other autistics, were well above average after all.
The researcher suspected the inability of this subgroup to understand conversation in everyday life was related to difficulty processing visual information simultaneously and switching attention rapidly enough between the various cues. She said that, outside the lab, she could see that the participants who had demonstrated superior auditory processing could not actually hear properly when interacting with her. I agreed with her hypothesis and mentioned that during the tests I had often closed my eyes to reduce the visual stimulation even further.