“Yeah, mumble mumble last night mumble mumble meal mumble Friday?” Oops. You just asked me something. What did you just say? Well, based on what you were talking about before – the bits I managed to catch – I guess you just asked me if I want to go out for a meal Friday. I’d better see if I’m correct – ask a hopefully relevant question and see what you say: “A meal this Friday? Where?”

At this point I either come across as “normal”, following the conversation, or I just dropped a spanner in the works and confused the heck out of you. And I never know which it’s going to be! The problem is that if there’s any distraction – background noise or movement in particular – then I fail to distinguish the speaker’s voice. I know they’re talking to me, I can see their lips moving and hear sounds, but even concentrating intently I can only interpret the odd word and have to guess the rest from context.

More often than I care to admit somebody will say something to me and I’ll respond with some acknowledgement. It’s several seconds later that I finally work out what they said and can tell whether my response was appropriate. Or whether I just looked stupid again.

See if you can work out the meaning of this short extract. To make things easier I’ve left in most of the nouns:

__________ impairment ___ social _________ stereotyped and restricted patterns ______ activities and interests, and _____ally signi_____lay in cog______opment or general _____ language.

This is from a description of Aspergers Syndrome that I’ve quoted previously. I admit I’ve been selective in the bits I blanked out, but this is only for the purpose of illustration. In a real situation there would be snatches of other conversations interleaved with this one, and the whole would be obscured by background noise:

The thing is, I don’t have hearing problems. I can pick up faint sounds like the clock ticking at home. I score in the average range in hearing tests. But if somebody says something while the TV is on – or there’s music playing or other conversations going on around us – then although I can hear all the sounds, I can’t separate them very well. It’s a problem with processing the sensory input and I find it hard work and very frustrating, so I often keep out of conversations in noisy environments. In fact I prefer to avoid noisy social environments altogether.

With all this it’s no surprise I prefer to communicate in writing – through email, text or similar mechanisms. The words are in front of me, not obscured by noise, and there is no need for an immediate response. I can take the time to compose my reply, re-reading their comment if necessary and thinking of le mot juste – the right word that will exactly convey my intended meaning.