Deconstructing Autism. 1: Sound Sensitivity.

I don’t listen rock music as it irritates me, I like Progressive, instrumental or relaxing. Depending on the situation and environment. I hate high pitch sounds so singers like Mariah Carey (nothing against her)  make my blood boil. I hate when there are many sounds together, it’s overwhelming, makes me feel dizzy irritated and sometimes even anxious. That’s why a party with loud music and crowd of people where everyone is talking laughing and all the other sounds is a mental torture for me. I use ear plugs in certain places and recently also at home. 

I'm not sure if it's ASD, ADHD or both (I'm diagnosed ASD but was told I need to get an official diagnosis for ADHD as they're sure I have both)

I notice the slightest sounds, sometimes a noisy place can be soothing as it drowns out smaller sounds,  But then at times I can be distracted by every sound I hear and find I'm trying to listen to them, but the other sounds are annoying me as they're getting in the way of me doing.

Sometimes I feel overloaded and need total quiet, but then as you say, sudden sounds become alarming.

Really depends on the moment. Popping headphones in can help but then the music can sometimes annoy me too. I find heavy metal /rock music soothing most times, I feel it's more "constant" so doesn't rattle my nerves. 

I Sperg said:

curiously enough, the louder the sound, the more call for "processing time"

In would add two other things to this:

• sounds that I can’t control, like a noisy neighbour or background office noise, can take over my entire conscious experience and render me stressed and useless 
• complex noise, like a room full of people talking, not necessarily loudly, results in my brain CPU going to 100% trying to split all the sounds out and understand them. I once literally fell over at a conference because of this.

I relate to the distress that sounds make and the desire to immerse yourself in music, I find my fight/flight responses kick in when I'm disturbed. I don't have any strategies other than avoiding noisy places and people, unfortunately this often means not going out in summer as my neighbours are really noisy and one little girl shreiks to the point where I go into a spontaneous low earth orbit. It's pretty much only human related noises that get to me, maybe because I sense that humans are the biggest danger. I hate it when my concentration is broken by someone coming into the room and speaking at me when I'm busy and in my own space. I wouldn't call it a drop in IQ, mostly because I think IQ is a poor measure, seeing as one can learn to do them better, they're culturally biased too. I've been accused of wanting to live a monastic existance and part of me is drawn to that way of living. My ideal would be to live in a small house with a big garden in the middle of nowhere surrounded by nature and animals. My strategy for dealing with electronic noises interfearing with my day or just generally making my life difficult is defenestration.

My daughter likes to suddenly scream. For me it’s panic, in case if my ears are not covered, I cover my ears and have reflex of running away, also slamming a car doors outside makes me shiver. My daughter’s Duplo blocks make me feel like my brain is trembling. 

I completely get where you're coming from, and relate with much of what you've written.  I'm on very low bandwidth at the moment, tho, so have very little energy to respond. 

What I would say, though, is that your reference to 'shock to the system' is a massive help: when things are very quiet (usually at home), my body 'hears' everything, and I physically feel the sound in my body - different sounds, different areas affected.  Examples include obvious sounds, such as my daughter closing the microwave door (it hits me with a thud, usually upper body - chest, upper arms) or even her plugging in her laptop (it's got a magnetic connection) - which generally delivers a much 'smaller' sensation, in my lower arms and hands. 

NB if there is general noise around (eg the radio or TV is on) my body doesn't seem to register these assaults - which seems to tie in with what you call 'sharp rise time' very well; for me, if my body is 'hearing' low/mid sound constantly, there is much less of a sharp rise time.  But in the silence, the physical hit to my body from specific sounds really does feel like an assault.

Like you, I appeared to have a hearing problem when I was young, and was taken to a clinic for tests (age ca 4) when the district noticed I didn't respond to my name like my three sisters did.  (Autistic?  Not sure.  I'm diagnosed with ADHD and dyspraxia; my ADHD report from 2015 said 'does not show autistic traits', but I wasn't formally assessed for it.  Since then, my daughter has been diagnosed autistic, and I certainly have traits.)

On a separate note my body feels extreme emotional pain as a sweep of tingling sensation across my knuckles, hands, wrists and/or right arm.

Hope that helps, and thank you for raising the topic.  Intrigued to see what other answers you receive!

Makes sense to me! Especially where you find a demand for processing means you feel your iq drops. I've heard using the ear plugs that block a certain amount of sound can help this.

On other thing though , adrenaline response in all humans diverts all power to essential functions to speed those up, so in some circumstances it might be that kicking in, on a pm course years ago the phrase "panic makes you stupid" was used when describing that fight or flight mode reducing cognitive ability.

I'll throw in my thoughts on how we process things generally, not just sounds but I think they all follow a similar pattern...

I work in IT and often relate to how tech works, essentially it follows certain natural and mathematical laws that we all must follow, our brains are computers.

The way I see things is that our autism means each area that processes anything does more work as it's processing more intensely. Due to us being more sensitive to input or that we also process things in more detail this overhead all adds up. Also, the layer of processing we add by masking, always double checking what we think or say is an extra overhead.

End result is we use more processing power, to which there is a limit at any one time. so we start to "queue" thoughts or focus on priority thoughts when we're maxed out. This also means we use more energy so are more tired, fatigued etc. generally finding that everything seems to take more effort for us than it would for NT people.

When I walk in the busy street, I hear a big car coming behind. I turn around. No, it’s not a van, it’s just normal car. Then I hear awful squeak of tram taking turn on the rails. When it passes I catch someone doing dishes in their kitchen. Then I hear something behind me so I make space for them to pass, but it turns out it was just some random trash being thrown by the wind few meters away. Birds, car engines, lawnmower, idk what else. Often these sounds echo in my head and make me feel somehow idk… irritated. Plus wherever I turn my head, I catch some irrelevant information. Names on the doorbells, car plates, name of the street, some other information such as private drive, bakery, broken pavement tile, one balcony on a building is painted in different color, etc and it also echoes in my head. Funny thing when I walk in the city and I catch the names on the doorbells, then I remember who lives in which area of the city, although I don’t know these people. I also tend to maybe subconsciously check which cars are from our city, which ones came from somewhere else and which city they are from. The only thing I do is put some music in my ears. Loud enough to wipe all this flood of information (acoustic, also visual and smells also seem irrelevant then) I just feel the rhythm, focus deeply on some thought and then I fly like an arrow straight through the city, even if someone waves me, I wouldn’t wave back because don’t notice them. I’m out, in my own world. So I either constantly turn around and catch everything or I put the music and then I run like a horse with blinders on. I don’t know what is this but I figured it out that NT people don’t experience things this way. Is it something with ASD or ADHD? I removed all the clocks at home because they make the constant tick sound. My daughters toys also make awful sounds so at home I often wear earplugs. Usually when I sit with my family in the room, I’m the one to suddenly ask “what sound is this?” They have no idea what I’m talking about, they hear nothing, but I catch it immediately that there is some new sound, sometimes it’s at home, sometimes coming from outside. They ask me why I care, but I just wanna know what is this. I was pretty much alarmed when for first time I heard an electric car parking outside, I had to open the window to see and identify what was that. My family laughed at me.