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Comment by MS90 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, hearing people over background noise is probably the thing that I struggle with the most. It's been a pretty big social hindrance, especially when I was in college. In crowded social areas like bars and restaurants it's very difficult for me to understand what people are saying. As a result, I ended up being the weird guy just sitting there not saying anything all night because I was unable to carry on a conversation. Hearing aids never seemed to help, because they amplified the background noise too.

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As someone with full spectrum hearing, a lot of those environments are awful for me too. Just miserable to be practically yelling to be heard and then needing to cup your hand over your ear to make out what they're saying, often just giving up and nodding and hoping that a "nod" response makes sense in the context of whatever they said.

fwiw: I've found it a fair bit easier to hear others with earplugs in (when it's noisy around). especially the concert-goer ones, at least in part since they usually reduce volume less (normal foam ones reduce 30db or so, which is quite a bit).

Me too, but others have problem with hearing me. It's harder to control my own volume and I tend to speak more softly because of the feedback the earplugs create.

That was me, also. I found that a pair of Bose Hearphones helped considerably. You can set them to focus 45 deg in front and cancel noise from behind. Basically, you hear the person you are facing. I've been in some incredibly noisy bar environments, and I find younger people are asking me to repeat, though I can make their speech out pretty well.

I am going to venture and say this is not related to the ear apparatus, but in perception processing. I believe this type of deficit has been associated with ADHD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders/variations.

As someone with attention issues, I've wondered if this contributes to my issues in loud environments. I feel like it's a blend of "your brain is being overwhelmed" and "this place actually sucks for everyone".

Yes. Hearing voices in a loud environment means turning the gain down on other sounds and amping the gain on the voices, but if your attention system can less efficiently choose or if your top-down inhibitory systems are inefficient, then comprehension will be difficult.

AFAIK I don't have any hearing loss. I wouldn't say that I have attention issues but I can't stand distracting environments - I enjoy loud music if it's a concert and that's what I'm there for, but otherwise I can't stand it.

I agree with your assessment. I pretty much don't go to bars because of the suckiness. You can't have a worthwhile conversation, so it's just constant drinking in an oppressive environment.

It's both. Google on "hidden hearing loss", "cochlear synaptopathy", "central processing disorders", "auditory scene analysis" and "the cocktail party problem".

I actually do have ADHD as well, and this was something that the doctors talked about. They told me that my hearing impairment would make it even more difficult to focus paired with the audio processing issues from ADHD.

That said, even in a quiet setting I have trouble understanding someone if I can't see their face/read their lips.

I'm sure that it could exacerbate things, but in my particular case if you graph my hearing response to various frequencies it looks like a valley or a capital V.

This. I have fantastic hearing, but I really struggle with this sort of thing due to differences in perception.

I don’t have hearing loss and this is a challenge for me.

A trick that always worked well for me was to plug my ears. I could discern voices much better that way. Otherwise it just sounded like a speaker being overdriven.

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