Continuing To Hear Noises After They've Stopped

[Eponastill]

Yesterday I was working away at home with this in the background
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/customMedievalLibrary.php
It helps me feel studious, it has a clock ticking and someone scribbling away on some scrolls, and in the background there are some monks distantly chanting plainsong on and off.
I had it on all day, but that's not unusual. But when I was sitting in the quiet house in the evening (the snooker was on) and when I went to bed, I kept hearing snatches of plainsong... hard to say whether my brain was interpreting quiet noises in the house, or whether it was just going round my head (but it seemed more like regular hearing than that). Also a weird thing about it was that they weren't the entire phrases that you hear in the recording, it was more like little bits of it repeated like a stuck record. I could focus on it enough to notice that, but then focusing on it too much made it disappear.
I was kind of put in mind of the silly scene in 'Spaced' where their raver friend dances to the sound of the kettle and the phone ringing, but it didn't feel quite like that, as there weren't obvious external noises that I was responding to. My OH sometimes records music in a studio and said he sometimes gets something similar. I wonder if anyone else has a similar tale?!

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Yesterday I was working away at home with this in the background
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/customMedievalLibrary.php
It helps me feel studious, it has a clock ticking and someone scribbling away on some scrolls, and in the background there are some monks distantly chanting plainsong on and off.
I had it on all day, but that's not unusual. But when I was sitting in the quiet house in the evening (the snooker was on) and when I went to bed, I kept hearing snatches of plainsong... hard to say whether my brain was interpreting quiet noises in the house, or whether it was just going round my head (but it seemed more like regular hearing than that). Also a weird thing about it was that they weren't the entire phrases that you hear in the recording, it was more like little bits of it repeated like a stuck record. I could focus on it enough to notice that, but then focusing on it too much made it disappear.
I was kind of put in mind of the silly scene in 'Spaced' where their raver friend dances to the sound of the kettle and the phone ringing, but it didn't feel quite like that, as there weren't obvious external noises that I was responding to. My OH sometimes records music in a studio and said he sometimes gets something similar. I wonder if anyone else has a similar tale?!

https://www.tinnitus.org.uk/musical...ical hallucination?,this is known as tinnitus.

Worth getting checked out if you continue to hear it or have some new physical issues.

A lengthy article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810018301600

It appears to differ from earworms. Re: earworms the computer game Hospital 2.0 has the worst earworm music I've ever heard and should come with a health warning.

16:30 Sundries by J-U-L-I-A is my favorite.

 

[brownmane]

Re: earworms the computer game Hospital 2.0 has the worst earworm music I've ever heard and should come with a health warning.

Good to know. I shall not listen. I tend to suffer from earworm music in the wee hours of the morning. Try sleeping with that.

 

[Frideswide]

I wonder if anyone else has a similar tale?!

many autistics have this Persistence Of <insert sense of choice here> for one or more of the senses.

I' have it on hearing - it's distinct from tinnitus which I also have - on sight and on touch

 

[Eponastill]

I' have it on hearing - it's distinct from tinnitus which I also have - on sight and on touch

Would you describe what that's like, Frideswide? I'd not heard of that before. (I would say it sounds 'interesting' but it may not be so 'interesting' to live with all the time?)

 

[Frideswide]

It means, for example, that

Sight - Depending on conditions I develop "trails" of objects - like a snail trail? something will leave a ghost of itself behind Hey! a new theory on the formation of ghosts! Also, colours transfer from one object to another, as do visual textures. Or the most striking part of one view will carry forwards into the next view - look down a railway platform and see a yellow umbrella in the crowd. Turn your head and there's a yellow umbrella in every direction

Hearing - any repeated noise has the potential to carry on once the source is silent. 30/45 minutes after 30 mins of an alarm for example. Not tinnitus which is a "sound" I "hear" but can identify as not being real without any processing. And not echoing which for me is where anything from a word to a short story comes back into your head and out of your mouth fully formed at any time after you originally heard it!

Touch - a physical touch sensation last on, even when the source is taken away. So that a light touch on the arm is still irritating you, for me up to about an hour if the sensation was light and painful in some way. I don't get it with stronger touches. Also associated with the reasonably common experience of a touch to the skin coming up rather like a burn or scald, seconds or minutes later. I don't get this but my friend develops a raised pink welt if you draw on her skin with a finger say, not hard enough to mark the skin when you do it. 2-3 minutes afterwards the welt appears. It's one way, I think, people get demonstrable "attacks by poltergeist" which they proudly display on camera for example. Do the sigil, then start filming and the nasty looking welt appears magically on clear skin. She uses it to baffle children... "My magic arm will tell me the initial of the birthday child!"

Any use @Eponastill ?

For me

* I really only get the effects when I'm very stressed and or very tired.

* None of my stuff is disabling for me, it's more just a quirk of being. It can be very difficult for people though.

* It's one of the things that you only find out you have post diagnosis when you find out it's a possibility. Before that you just think it's what everyone experiences.

 

[ravensocks]

You know when you've been on a ferry, and once you get back on dry land it sometimes still feels like you're at sea? I wonder if it is something similar, your body has adjusted to the noise and so tries to find it/counteract it?

Probably not a very scientific or medical (or possible) explanation, but interesting!

Also that sounds like an awesome background study track Eponastill! Libraries rock.

 

[Eponastill]

Thank you Frideswide, that was so interesting. All three of them. That's astute of you to have noticed the connection with the touch sense, but it does indeed sound like another displacement of the stimuli through time, like the sight and sound examples.

"Before that you just think it's what everyone experiences" - indeed, we all live in our own little bubbles assuming (and why not) that everyone experiences things in similar ways. And 'normality' doesn't seem like it warrants picking apart for most people. So when the differences finally emerge, other people just think you're peculiar and then you tend to clam up in surprise!

It makes me wonder how many other people experience these sorts of things (I can imagine the visual effects informing people's artwork?).

thanks for explaining!

 

[Frideswide]

thanks for explaining!

you know me - I'll chirrup about autism it's hinterlands of experience for as long as anyone will listen. Longer actually

I'm thinking that what we are discovering, the wide range of "normal" perceptions, may be involved somehow in the sensing of fortean phenomena?

 

[Spookdaddy]

I get this all the time with things like car and burglar alarms and ringing phones - but only if they are some distance away. I get similar if I hear things like phone alarms, or even old school alarm clocks through party walls.

If it's up close and loud, no problem - it's either on or off. But muffled, or at a distance, I'll often still be 'hearing' the sound long after I know it's not there.

I actually thought this was normal.

 

[Eponastill]

I actually thought this was normal.

Perhaps it is? Perhaps we'll hear from more people either way, or somewhere between. I guess it must be to do with brain wiring.

 

[EnolaGaia]

For the sake of clarification I'd like to sort through some possible interpretations and implications of the experiences reported here ...

(1) Eponastill's original post alluded to the possibility of the sound being "in one's head" rather than actually "heard" as if it were an external stimulus.

I'm wondering whether other folks recognize the possible distinction between sensing an external sound versus something internal (like a stuck tune) and (if so ... ) whether they're referring to one, the other, or maybe both at different times in reporting experiences similar to Eponastill's.


(2) Eponastill also mentioned one of the situations in which the sound was "heard" was after going to bed.

Hypnagogic sounds or noises (most recently addressed under the ill-fitting label "Exploding Head Syndrome") are brief and indistinguishable from external stimuli. When I was younger my own hypnagogic "blasts" were drawn from a small set of alert sounds (e.g., my mother calling my name; a phone or doorbell ringing). As I get older I've noticed (especially in recent months) I've been "hearing" what are evidently hypnagogic sounds that are much more random (e.g., a snatch of news reader monologue; machinery at a distance).


(3) The hypnagogic sound phenomenon is pretty much hard-wired into the way our brains work, so it's a special case. I'm wondering more generally whether there are differences in such "replay" experiences based on a person's ability to consciously "hear" a replay of a known sound in his / her head alone. We recognize aphantasia as an inability to generate or replicate visual imagery in the mind's eye, and many folks diagnosed with aphantasia also report deficits in mentally replicating or imagining sounds, smells and / or touches.

I'm wondering whether the relatively recent recognition of aphantasia has been too narrowly defined, and it would be more appropriate to think in terms of internal capacity for "imagination" involving all the senses and not just vision.

 

[Eponastill]

"We recognize aphantasia as an inability to generate or replicate visual imagery in the mind's eye, and many folks diagnosed with aphantasia also report deficits in mentally replicating or imagining sounds, smells and / or touches." That is a very interesting observation.