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

[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.