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Have you ever been in a meeting or with multiple people and it suddenly sounds like the person is speaking a foreign language?
It happens to me about once a week. Normal meeting or sometimes at a party. Someone will be talking. I'll be following along fine. Then suddenly I can not understand a think they are saying. It's not like I cant hear them or they are mumbling. Just cant understand a thing they say for a few sentences.
Then everything is fine.
I've tried googling it, but nothing shows up.
Is there a name for this?
Does everyone get it?
Anyone ever heard of it?
I have trouble separating conversation from background noise. I have always assumed that it's an audio processing weakness. It is one reason for instance that I have never had a strong affinity for popular musical vocals. I've noted that some people can pick up on lyrics readily in situations where I am just never going to figure the blasted thing out without looking them up.
Showing my age here: the Commodores, "She's a Brick House" was opaque to me for decades. Couldn't see why people were relating to "She's a big ow". Catchy tune, but nonsensical and maybe misogynistic. Then one day I read the lyrics and looked up the metaphor and the lights went on. That's how it is with me and popular music.
It is not really much of a practical problem. I find my reading comprehension more than makes up for it; it's better and more intuitive than most people's.
In my line of work, customers call in on the phone; it sometimes takes a few seconds to "hone in" on their language - which of course is English. This is especially true with woman with a certain, higher pitched voice.
I actually have this in a visual form. If I see loads of detail in one place, suddenly I can't interpret any of it and if someone asks me to describe what I've seen, I'll have images of shapes - circles, rectangles, whatever - and movement and some sound rather than clear images of what was there.
I had terrible trouble in my geography classes (or the geography portion of social studies classes) throughout my school experience because of this. I would look at a map of Europe with all the shapes, lines and words and would just "blank out" and could suddenly see nothing but random lines.
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