An interesting study conducted by Researchers at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders points to genetic variations being responsible for a person’s ability to listen to more than one conversation at once. This skill of being able to listen to and comprehend two things at once is known as dichotic listening.
And I must have inherited it. Super Dad marvels at how when my family gets together (my two sisters and my mother), we can carry on about three conversations at once and never miss a beat. Frankly, I don’t even thing about it. Unless my brain is especially tired and stressed, I can juggle quite a few conversations simultaneously, and until I had a child with central auditory processing disorder, I assumed everyone could.
But they can’t. In fact, where LuLu is concerned, she has major trouble with the flow of even one conversation. The speed is what gets her – and frustrates her greatly. She can’t keep up when a conversation includes more than two people, or if someone else interrupts the flow of the conversation and starts another conversation. Part of this could be attributed to her ADHD or OCD (she gets stuck), but there’s more to it than that.
“I told them that they were talking to fast,” she related to me yesterday about the other kids at her day camp. “But they couldn’t stop. They just had to go really fast.”
And that is a frustrating thing. While LuLu’s processing speed is about that of an LP record (33 1/3); the rest of the world is talking at 45 or even 78. (Yes, I know I’m old and have lost the entire CD generation on this analogy.)
Even more troublesome is that LuLu can’t contain her frustration, so she explodes or acts out behaviorally when her auditory input is overwhelmed. Yet, I know Super Dad can’t always keep up with the speed of the conversation either. Instead, he effectively “tunes it out”, scanning the conversation for key words or points, but missing much of the information. It happens all the time. And later he’ll ask me a question or make a comment that lets me know he didn’t pick up half of what the conversation was about.