Auditory Thinking
Thu Jul 23, 2009 10:00:30 pm

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I have difficulty reading, writing, and programming while listening to music or speech. This wasn't always a problem for me. When I was younger, I had to do homework and study for exams while my sister listened to the radio or watched television. I was able to handle that fine and I didn't even need to block out what I was hearing. I'm not sure when I lost the ability. It was some time in high school or college when I started being unable to focus if the television was on. Instrumental music was still fine back then, but even that is too distracting for me now.

I have been evaluating the problem to see what causes it and to search for a possible solution. The main problem is that I mentally vocalize words when I read and I can't hear myself think if my ears hear actual words or music. When I learned to read, I had more difficulty than most people in reading silently. I did soft vocalization to avoid being heard. That gradually transformed into doing non-vocalized speech movements with my mouth. I mastered silent reading by perfecting the ability to hear the vocalization in my mind.

What I hear also affects writing, because I proofread a lot. I also tend to stop in the middle of a sentence to think more about what I am writing and I have to reread to determine where to continue. Programming involves both reading and writing, but there is also a tremendous amount of logical thinking that goes far beyond what is needed in ordinary writing. I think through complex logic using mentally vocalized words. If the logic is exceptionally complex, I sometimes still need to do actual vocalization.

Instrumental music interferes through a slightly different mechanism. Hearing words messes up the words that are in my mind by mixing the imagined and heard words together into incoherent sentences and phrases. Hearing instrumental music doesn't do that, but it shifts my focus and uses up the resources in my auditory cortex. That leaves me mentally mute, unable to mentally speak the words that I am reading or thinking. Bad music isn't a problem, because I just block that out of my mind as I do with background noise.