Audio Processing disorder?

It often does feel like I'm using just one area of the brain and allowing too much input to run through it for comfort.

An additional problem with restricted mental throughput is that there are apparently some 200 different schools of psychotherapy. Without mentioning any names (because they all seem genuine enough), each one of these schools has its own way to describe and label that which WE experience. I am just a bit cheesed off with people who think that it is better to call the problem caetextia (for instance), as in context blindness. Especially as they mostly seem to be barking up roughly the same tree as the rest of us; but appear to have a need to impose yet another new label (rather than refining an existing one). Maybe caetextia is a better label; but it just seems to add to the confusion. Totally overloaded by it all, I am! ;-) And when they start wittering on about brain-sidedness, things really do get a bit fraught. I spent some hours last night reading a chapter about left-handed and right-handed caetextia. My conclusion in the end was that I probably experience some of both, at different times. At least clinicians like Tony Attwood have the commonsense to talk mainly about the multiple manifestations, without too much time spent on their own latest pet theory. One day, scanning might be able to locate the brain areas in use for each activity, but there are so many different manifestations that all muddle along together, they are inevitably going to be super difficult to unravel all the knots. Until that time, could all these schools of psychotherapy make some effort not to constantly relabel every term, just for the sake of looking more logical than their rivals.

I should also say that I find most of the posts on this forum very constructive, as most tend NOT to generalise their own experience to everyone. As the saying goes, when you have met one person on the spectrum, you have met one only. (There is undoubtedly something here, many could relate to their own experience :-)

NAS62419 said:

This often means someone will say something, and i'll ask them to repeat it, then halfway through them repeating it, it'll click in my brain from the first time

I can relate to this, but thought that many people experienced it. Maybe not.

What I do know is that I struggle to process spoken words in the presence of chaotic background noise or other conversations, and I've heard that there's a neurological reason for this in that people with autism use a single area of brain to process both voice and noise where non-autistic people have dedicated areas for each. I don't have a reference for this though (I need to find one!).

I can relate to needing time to process spoken words for sure.

I think I might have something like that. I live abroad for decades in a country with a tonal language, which I have never really got to grips with. I can read the local script (nothing like English) quite well, but it is always listening that I find difficult; even though I do what most people would do in this circumstance by lip-reading. (But, of course, tonal languages are not particularly labial. Locals can be so deeply involved in activities, but still understand what is being said by rising and falling tones, but paying no attention at all to the lips.) It just takes too long for me to process the local language spoken at a normal speed (which is naturally very fast, abrupt and terse). But I also seem able to process it when someone is speaking very politely and slowly. And yes, it seems like, as you say, gobbledygook.In fact, it frequently seems to bear almost no relation to slow speech in the same language. And sometimes the brain does seem to click and recognise something when it is repeated. (This might be because the context is often clearer the second or third or more times around.) I've noticed similar listening problems with another (UK) language too; which is definitely not very tonal. (In terms of local accents, I reckon the greatest problem I've ever had was trying to understand a Dudley person operating in a very noisy environment. I had to listen about 8 times before I began to recognise just one or two words. And I'd say that I rarely have to ask someone to repeat in British or American English, or most UK regional accents. (I love listening to different accents, and can imitate quite a few, I used to have quite a heavy accent myself, but have lost it abroad.)

It has occurred to me quite a few times that this listening difficulty might be a comorbidity. About 20 years ago I had a whole battery of hearing tests here. I was after told I had a slight problem with high frequencies. At the time, I put that down to previously working in a noisy environment. (And this is also a very noisy country). But when asked what I could do about it, I was told that at my age it wasn't yet practical to take any measures. i have thought about going for hearing tests again, but as the whole spectrum thing is taboo here, I imagine they would probably just write it off as a need for a hearing aid. But of course they can't really do much more than that; even if I were to ever convince them that they could constructively break the taboo.

Another thought on this. I have many of the balance problems of dyspraxia. That might indicate damage of the inner ear or its neural connections at an early age. Certainly, there were problems at birth and a couple of years later that might have had that impact. The speed of my mental processing is undoubtedly a bit slow, and there are obviously also problems with multitasking.