'It Seems Like I Hear Everything at Once'

"Impaired auditory gating is seen in a variety of neurological conditions, including schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD), dementia, and others. These disruptions are precognitiveandcan predispose to behavioral traits such as distractibility, anxiety, avoidance, or irritability. This is because the hierarchy of salience collapses when sensory gating is impaired. Every input, no matter how trivial, forces its way into awareness; everything is urgent, everything is foreground, everything is loud."

"Your brain notices the clinking of cups, the hiss of the espresso machine, the laughter three tables over. However, it also easily suppresses these sounds, so you can focus on your friend. Now imagine that every sound stays at full volume. The espresso machine's hiss and the laughter keep intruding. Even the scrape of a chair demands attention. Nothing recedes into the background, and you feel flooded by sounds."

Sensory gating failures produce a collapse of hierarchical salience so that all sensory inputs compete equally for awareness. Auditory symptoms dominate many subjective reports, with more than half of inventory items concerning hearing. Impaired auditory gating appears across multiple neurological conditions, including schizophrenia, ADHD, and dementia, and operates precognitively to predispose toward behavioral patterns such as distractibility, anxiety, avoidance, and irritability. Everyday situations become overwhelming because ordinary background sounds fail to be suppressed, remain foregrounded, and continually intrude on attention, profoundly shaping mood, cognitive function, and interpersonal behavior.

Read at Psychology Today