ASD !(APD || ANC) FFS
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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People with APD now have access to ANC headphones and are thus using them.
I had APD in the 70s and I have it now. Difference is that i have ANC headphones now and can get them to block out what my brain won't.
Like the rise in ADHD and Autism diagnosis... There isn't more cases, just diagnosis got better or more available.
Correlation not causation.
Idiots.
Like the rise in ADHD and Autism diagnosis... There isn't more cases, just diagnosis got better or more available.
It's both.
We're finding that even things like microplastics are causing changes that's not fully understood. There's even a recent study that links an increase in histamine to worsened ADHD symptoms.
And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a development of ADHD later on.
And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young ~~can trigger a~~ correlates with the development of ADHD later on.
FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.
Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.
Are ~~kids~~ people getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD?
The research shows that poor sleep hygiene can be a trigger for ADHD related symptoms. Poor sleep hygiene is not the same as "didn't sleep well". Poor sleep hygiene is not going to bed at an appropriate time, going to bed at wildly different times each night, blue light exposure within 2 hours of bedtime, etc.
The ages of 0 - 4 years are the most crucial for brain development. It's why newborns sleep several times a day. The brain hasn't finished forming by the time they are born. Even at the age of 3, kids are still napping mid-day. And those naps are extremely critical for healthy brain development.
So without good sleep hygiene, it can stunt brain development in a way that results in ADHD, or ADHD like symptoms.
Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited.
I have ADHD and DSPS. The reason people with DSPS feel awake at night is due to an issue with melatonin production. The brain doesn't release melatonin normally (or at all) so the natural "feeling sleepy" signal never comes. I take prescription tryptophan and I've never slept better in my life. My "natural" sleep time in 2/3am and waking up is 10/11am. But with tryptophan I can have a "normal" sleep schedule.
And that's another interesting thing. Kids diagnosed with ADHD can see improved outcomes when they are given tryptophan to help regulate sleep.
Btw, if you're wondering. Tryptophan is an amino acid, and you can get it in pills that have medically measured doses. Why not just take melatonin? Well tryptophan metabolizes into melatonin and serotonin. It's a guaranteed way to get melatonin.
Off the shelf melatonin pills aren't regulated with dosages the same way. In fact, a pill in a 10mg melatonin bottle might only have 1mg of melatonin or even 15mg. They aren't reliable, and the other issue is that melatonin tends to not be bioavailable enough to work reliably. Tryptophan is very bioavailable. It's the stuff in turkey that makes people sleepy after eating it.
Edit: grammar
😌this is so me, lol
Some Linux and some DnB and the night is gone 🤣
I'm wondering if the cause and effect are the other way around, people that have trouble with noise (such as people with APD) might want noise cancelling headphones. The rise in cases of APD might indicate otherwise, but with the information provided, it sounds like it might be under-diagnosed anyway.
The first thing many people used to assume is that if you had any problems with listening, you might be somewhat deaf. APD and other difficulties listening definitely aren't deafness, but I wonder if there is increased awareness of other reasons why someone might have difficulty understanding speech.
but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.
Me, wearing my noise-cancelling headphones for 10-11 hours a day ....
I have my noise cancelling airpods pro, but never use ANC because it has that white noise sound I don't like. It's basically blasting more noise in your earhole to drown out/cancel out the noise around you.
Yeah, ANC quality can vary a lot and generally it's even worse for earbuds.
I have a pair of Bose QC Ultra headphones which have amazing ANC.
A few month back there was a constuction site across the street. At one point I felt my desk vibrating, so I took of my headphones ... only then did I realised they were using a jackhammer.
Similar story here, Bose QC whilst the house next door was (basically) being demolished... I just found the headphones ate batteries faster.
I sometimes find I'm just working with the headphones on and whatever I was listening to had stopped ages ago.
by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can "forget" to filter out the noise.
Also growing up in the quiet countryside, I can say that you do not “forget” to hear sounds like cars... it's definitely the everyday background noise that's the problem.
As the world become more and more noisy. And people become more a more shitty with regards of doing noise without care about how it affects others. ANC become a necessity for some people.
I am 29 and I already have minuscule hearing loss (if results of the last hearing test were factual), and I don't really listen to music/podcasts on headphones that much either.
I am also one of these people who still has regular PC speakers instead of gaming headsets or whatever.
So wait, I'm not just a grumpy old man who doesn't like a lot of noise, this is actually a disorder?
Honestly though it's an interesting question and I wonder if this is just the "natural state." I really started to feel it after I went RVing for a year. It's a relatively recent (in the overall span of humanity) development that people would be in groups large enough to make this be an issue.
The cause of Sophie's APD diagnosis is unknown, but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.
Other audiologists agree, saying more research is needed into the potential effects of their prolonged use.
That looks to me like, "audiologists have no bloody clue where this issue is coming from, and are therefore throwing shit at the wall in the hope that something will stick."
Nope it's a very reasonable hypothesis. "Symptom X suddenly occurs frequently. That started when people started doing Y. According to our understanding, Y has a direct impact on the functioning of X". Causation has still to be established formally but it'd be quite surprising if it was mere correlation, as in it would overturn the understanding audiologists have about how things work.
Bluntly said: If you never train filtering out noise, then you suck at filtering out noise. That looks dead obvious, if it's wrong, then in a very, very interesting way. General relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics kind of interesting.
The problem is not the hypothesis, the problem is that it isn't really presented as a hypothesis. Reporting on the results before doing the experiment isn't the way to go.
Our theories of how the world works are necessarily incomplete, and experiments turn up things that overturn scientific understanding often enough. The way this is set up matches a common pattern of vilifying tech without seeing whether it's deserved or not. Maybe not wearing a noise cancellation headset would, in fact, help this patient, but until that's tested and found out to be true, reporting on it is just spreading FUD.
her audiologist believes
(emphasis mine). Belief is colloquial speech for working hypothesis. Her prescription will have been along the lines of "ease on those headphones, go to a forest or park and just listen, use them only if you really feel them to be necessary, try to expose yourself".
"Nothing can ever be acted upon unless we have a meta-study examining fifty double-blind studies" is pseudoscepticism.
I really struggle to process voices, but I hear absolutely everything.
Someone talking to me can get completely drowned out by a 15KHz hum of an electronic device, the acoustics of a room or a TV in the background.
Yet, I ask them if they are having trouble hearing me over all the noise. They usually reply "wharlt noise?" If it's a high-pitch hum, they won't acknowledge the noise even if I show them on a spectral analyser.
If it's a high-pitched hum, they may genuinely be unable to hear it. It's common for people to lose their hearing in very high registers quickly as they age (like, most teens still hear them, but thirty-somethings mostly don't). Without noticing, since it doesn't impede day-to-day communication.
Exactly.
Is she wearing high heels every day? Could be bullshit, but could be related. 🙄
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The cause of Sophie's APD diagnosis is unknown, but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.
So fucking stupid...
Kid grew up on a quiet farm in the countryside, then she moved to London and probably 100+ student plus lectures.
It's not that noise cancelling headphones prevented her from developing normally, she developed in an environment like what we evolved to handle.
Then she got thrown into a cacophony of sound that is one of the planets largest/busiest cities...
And they act like she is the problem and not noise pollution?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00642-5
Noise pollution is fucking a lot of us up, and people who grew up with it are used to it, but that doesn't stop the negative consequences of it. Someone that never had to deal with it is obviously going to have what looks like a sudden onset of a condition, but the person is fine.
The environment is the problem.
People are posting about wanting to run away to the woods but I think it's important to remember that cities can be quiet.
Not that we should all move to Delft, but if we built infrastructure for people instead of cars cities wouldn't be so fucking loud.
My tolerance of noise and light pollution has gone way the hell down as I have gotten older. I want to live in the woods at this point.
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I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂
It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: "Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people's hearing problems?" If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.
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I kinda regard ANC and smart watches as pacifiers for adults. The real world is only going to hurt more the longer you stay attached to the teat.
Do you feel the same about other wearable tech, like clothes and shoes?
A bit with shoes if worn all the time. They destroy your arches, toe splay, and hip alignment with your spine. And you become dependant because your feet get so soft and sensitive. Plus people drag those dirty things all over their homes.
Calling shoes and clothes wearable tech is quite a stretch. Particularly compared to smart watches and headphones. Why did you make that false equivalence?
Plus people drag those dirty things all over their homes.
Yeah, I'm glad I married someone who's adamant about not wearing shoes in the house.
Article literally starts off just describing my ADHD related auditory processing difficulties, which is interesting for their claims because I don't often listen to music in the first place because of it.
The only thing I use my headphones for are podcasts and audio books that I have rewind because I forgot I was listening to something.
My knee jerk response as a result is that it's probably just younger people being more comfortable admitting something is wrong and looking for an explanation from the wrong people. They note that it is prevalent in aneurotypical people but don't seem to have questioned that maybe these people simply aren't diagnosed properly.
It's especially interesting that they chose a woman as the focus for the article, with women being demonstrably underdiagnosed in particular.
Yeah those first couple paragraphs were just “ADHD/autistic woman behaves like an ADHD/autistic woman. Time to blame her for using accommodation equipment!” (Not actually Dx’ing her, but I recognize a lot of my own patterns here).
Like for fuck’s sake let us have our small bits of sanity. Tuning out the constant hell that is everyday life is not a sin.
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Bad title. The article examines whether specifically noise-cancelling headphones may be involved in listening issues.
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Maybe if they weren't all in tiny cramped apartments with paper-thin walls and multiple roommates they wouldn't need to wear headphones all the time.
Also, voice chat doesn't work very well with speakers and microphone without a lot feedback.
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