Selective Hearing

Some people say that it's both men and women who suffer from selective hearing. I think due to having a hearing loss I do it a lot more due to it being easier to do than most.

It takes concentration to listen, not because the conversation is boring but because due to being hearing impaired you have to process the sounds into words. Auditory Processing I believe it's called, where you hear the sound, translate the sound and then understand the sound. If you can't hear the sounds all that well in the first place, it makes it that much harder to understand and process.

For instance and this happens all the time to me, I'll hear a sentence but miss a couple of words, but I can guess what the missing words are. You'll use other keys to help understand, lipreading, the vague sound or just the words in the rest of the sentence to help fill in the gaps.

People find it frustrating when you say 'pardon' but then in the middle of repeating yourself, the other person suddenly interrupts and will answer back and you're like, so why did you say pardon then?

Well, I do this frequently, I'll miss a few words and say pardon but in the time that the person is repeating themselves I'm processing what was said and will suddenly put together the sentence and answer them before they've had a chance to finish repeating themselves. It's due to this auditory processing, the length of time it takes for me to hear the sound and getting processed by the brain.

Hence why I sometimes get so tired, all this concentration on listening can take it out of you. So if I'm at this tired state I literally will forget to listen. Sounds strange I know but it's true. Someone will be talking and I will just zone out and I really do believe that it is not because I'm not interested in what they are saying but my brain just gets tired of processing all the sounds into words and will stop listening.

Of course I've used this to my advantage before saying that I just didn't hear something that was said but more often than not it is actually a nuisance to me. Certainly Mike would agree it's a pain as he'll often complain that I've zoned out and stopped listening, or don't listen properly and assume that I've heard something correctly but in fact I haven't. I'll listen to a sentence assume that I heard 'house' when he is actually referring to a 'mouse'. I'll put in the most sensible word into the sentence when actually he is talking about something completely different.

Rather annoying really but something a lot of people suffer from but don't have a name for it. I know it happens to everyone at one point or other but for me it's a daily occurrence.