The martial art of noise

[unixronin]

I had an insight a while back, that I don't think I ever posted here.  It's about another aspect of how Aspie minds work — or, at least, how my mind works.  I don't know for sure whether this is a personal quirk, or whether it's common to many (even all) Aspies.

It's about noise, and attention.

You see ... we can't help thinking about stuff.  Many of us experience ... compulsions, needs ... to do things like classify data, find buried patterns in data, even in random-looking environmental data encountered by chance.  It's the mental processing.  We can't — or at least, can't easily — shut it off.

Now, there's a lot of kinds of noise out there.  People who work in the field have all kinds of technical terms for different kinds of noise.  There's white noise, for instance, sound that contains random levels of energy distributed across its entire frequency range.  Ocean surf is a good example of white noise.  Or there's pink noise — noise which contains the same amount of energy at all frequencies.  It's very useful for acoustic research and acoustic measurement, because if you have an emitter of pink noise, and a receiver whose characteristics you know some distance away, you can compare what you send to the emitter to what you get back from the receiver, and you can use the difference to calculate exactly how the emitter and the environment are affecting sounds — how much they attenuate or boost the signal at what frequencies, to as fine a frequency resolution as you care to examine the signal.  That, in turn, means that you can then calculate compensate for that, so that a listener sitting where your receiver was will hear exactly the sound you intended them to hear.  If you have a home theater system that automatically calibrates its speakers, it uses pink noise to do it.

But that's not the kind of noise we're interested in here.  Those are kinds of auditory noise.  Right now, what we're interested in is what I'll call semantic noise.

You see, from a semantic viewpoint, there are three kinds of noise.  The equivalent to white noise is ... let's call it empty noise.  It's just ... noise and nothing else.  It doesn't have any meaning embedded in it.  It's just a sound.  Your car's engine is empty noise.  So is the sound of road construction outside.  (Well, mostly.  Both contain information of a kind, but it's not semantic information.)

The opposite of empty noise is sound that contains information.  Music.  Speech.  A morse code stream.  The clicks from a Geiger counter.  Even speech in a foreign language — even one that you don't speak or understand — or a made-up, artificial language.  You don't have to be able to speak the language to recognize that it is, indeed, a language and that it does indeed contain information.  You know that you don't understand the information, but that's OK, because yopu know that you don't understand it.  (And anyway, with enough to analyze, you can probably start to pick it up.)

Let's call this kind of sound "signal" for now.

The third kind of sound is where the problem comes in.  I'm going to call it pseudo-signal.  It's empty noise, but it's empty noise that sounds like signal without actually being signal.  Good examples include the kind of nonsense words that small children make up, or glossolalia, or perhaps the "scat singing" that is part of certain styles of jazz.  And because it sounds like signal, we — or I — have to try to analyze it and identify the information contained in it.

But there is no information.

It's not a conscious act.  There's apparent information there.  And because it sounds like signal, I can't not try to analyze the signal, isolate and identify the data.  Consciously, I can try to ignore it — but subconsciously, I can't not try to parse it.  But there isn't really any data there to parse.  So, my subconscious fails to analyze the apparent signal — and, when it fails, it reallocates more processing power to the problem.  And it still fails, because there's not really a signal there.  So it reallocates still more processing power to the problem.  And it still fails.  It's a runaway positive-feedback condition.  Before long, you're unable to keep your mind focused on anything, you can't think, you completely lose mental state, because all available processing power is tied up trying to analyze that damned signal.  Pseudo-signal is sort of a cognitive denial-of-service attack.

So tell me, my fellow Aspies ... is this just me, or is it something common to many of us?  Does pseudo-signal jam your brain too?  What else has the same effect on you?

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I don't usually consider myself Aspergilicious, though I have some tendencies there, but...yeah. I have a pretty good relevance filter, but it fails for things that *might* be interesting, or things that hack the cortex (like flashing things).

Burbling water? Okay. A fan fluttering, varying in speed rather than making a constant noise? Not okay.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

I'm no an aspie, but I find non-European languages very hard to think through. A language with similar roots to English doesn't bother me, even if I'm not actually catching any of it, but being stuck listening to people talk in Chinese makes me want to beat my head against the wall.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I don't have a problem with that. I know it's a language, even though it's one I don't know, and that's good enough for my mind to file it under "Recognized signal, no translation available."

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I am an order addict. Novel patterns, and exploring the order in them, makes me hyperfocus.

What stinks are the teases -- which is why I find physics research quite frustrating, because it's more about analyzing a bunch of half-baked ideas and waiting for experiments to clear the air; or worse, running the experiments yourself. I guess you could call this pseudo-signal. I latched onto research because I enjoyed learning physics so much, but in retrospect it's so obviously not the same thing.

And so I need to unwind with stuff I know is not that interesting, but gives me a little fix -- screwing with my Gentoo setup, trolling Wikipedia, etc.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Maybe your car's engine is just white noise...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

OK, I was short on empty noise examples. :) How about a Hillary Clinton speech? It conveys zero actual information.........

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

See, I think that's more like the "stuff that sounds like speech but isn't" category.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

Yes. Not quite the same experience, but definitely familiar. Randomness I can deal with--white noise doesn't bother me--but if there's bias in the noise, I go half out of my head trying to pull out signal. The best example is what it's like when you're listening to a radio station that's just out of the area; you can catch a word or two beneath the noise, a hint of a melody, and I just have to devote a large fraction of my processing power to improving the gain.

Wernicke's aphasia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_aphasia) is something similar to glossolalia that drives me up the wall. Ditto with schizophasia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophasia).

I once had a GF who had a massive schizophasic attack when we were in the middle of breaking up. Terrifying and soul-scarring experience. If you ever decide to give me large doses of experimental psychoactives that run the risk of permanently destroying large portions of my long-term memory... well, please make sure that goes first.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

I would like to strongly recommend that neither of you listen to Diamanda Galas. Since one of her tricks is glossolalia.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The best example is what it's like when you're listening to a radio station that's just out of the area; you can catch a word or two beneath the noise, a hint of a melody, and I just have to devote a large fraction of my processing power to improving the gain.

Yup, that's a similar phenomenon that also drives me nuts: distant music at what I tend to call "subliminal volume". It's too quiet to actually hear it enough to recognize it, but too loud to ignore, just floating off on the edge of audibility. But at least that's just irritating; it doesn't take over all my processing cycles trying in vain to parse it.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

I think it was in the New Scientist magazine recently, but might have been Discover, about a scientist/neurologist who found a way to desensitize painful memories. It was something about reliving the memories while being given a hormone. I really don't remember the particulars. While I have several exceedingly painful memories, I would not have them lessened in anyway for fear that I would lose the information that I gained along with them.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Pseudosignals jam everyone, I think. I can't remember what it's called, but I remember at least one privacy device based on this concept--it emits random conversation-like sounds at speaking volume so that you can have a real conversation near it and not be understood by casual listeners.

The difference probably has more to do with your ability to turn off processing on a source or at least broad classification of sources In other words, can you ignore the pseudosignal? I suspect most normals can, at the expensive of the real signals it's masking.

I get majorly distracted by this sort of thing, but I don't know that it's an Asperger's thing. I suspect it's more on the ADD spectrum; Asperger's is more about human signal processing (subtext, facial expressions, tone of voice, and implicit social expectations) whereas ADD is more about environmental processing.

In my case, small noises just within my range of hearing pull my attention to them like a magnet. This causes all sorts of interesting problems in apartment living or cubicle working.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

when my roommate has the alarm turned on to radio/siren combo it totally blots out my ability to intake any other auditory information. i think it's an evil evil thing and i don't know why they manufacture machines capable of doing that. it wouldn't wake me up, it'd make me kill the machine and go back to sleep.

anyway. it totally jams my brain up. particularly when i find myself focusing comprehension level mental attention to pseudo noize. and then i find myself getting irritable and anxious and unpleasant for company :P

(and then there's the extremely talkative four year old who doesn't understand that the odd cycling of the dryer on a vaguely nonrepeating pattern really drowns out what he's trying to tell me.)

got tested yesterday for CAPD. turns out that my brain can parse just fine. as long as i don't have to intake any meaning from the signal beyond the auditory sign of a word or two (comprehension? hah!)

i should just break down and go talk to a brain person and see what i can find out.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

CAPD?

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

central auditory processing disorder.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's a new one on me. But then, I'm sure there's plenty I haven't heard of.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

kind of a catch-all for auditory processing weirdnesses.

i think the test they gave would only pick up serious problems. *shrug*

or maybe the issue is how i respond to feeling overwhelmed by auditory information.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I know exactly where you are coming from. For me, one of the major problems is the sound track of the computer games that my children play. (The explosion sounds in things like Warcraft III are just crazy, but the talking sounds from The Sims or the speech in the AoM type games does it for me.)

I find the most process diversion in aperiodic noise. Something regular I can generally wipe from even subconscious evaluation.

I was about eight when I learned to let the sound (and sights) flow through me without effect. It is so ingrained in my coping skill set that I seldom need to evaluate it anymore.