Yes, Im sure that the title sounds odd. I have an odd problem. I cannot hear and read at the same time. For some reason, when I read I can hear that someone is talking but not what they say, nor can I gage the urgency of their communication. Only when I break the connection between my eyes and the words, which can be difficult depending on my level of involvement, can I hear what someone is actually saying. I have this problem to a lesser degree with most visual forms of communication like television and I tend to be more focused on the way a person talks than what they are actually saying. I generally look away so I can comprehend what they are saying better. This is secondary though. I seem to be unable to multitask. If I am speaking and some visual "something", could be words on a page, a commercial, a painting, a person, catches my attention, I lose the ability to speak and it just stops. It has happened in the middle of a sentence although I have learned to compensate for that a bit and can keep the pauses/stammers to a minimum. Sometimes people think I stutter. I do remember what I read with far greater recall than most people and am a walking encyclopedia of trivial information gleaned from a huge variety of sources.
I am 34, F and have had this problem all of my life. I have always read at a very high level and can even remember the feeling of being impatient at the rate they were teaching me letters and sounds. It was as if I were being reminded of something I already knew. I still prefer books to movies or television and rarely watch it. I have a tendency to keep reading materials in various stages of completion all over my home and read them at the same time. I keep up with many online activities as well such as forums and newsgroups. I am a passable artist, more technical than creative, with an ability to reproduce others' art but not really create my own. I cannot watch horror movies or any that engender extreme anxiety or fear because they seem to affect me more they do your average person, more like I can't filter them through the "it's only a movie" filter.
So what I am asking is this; is there some way to train myself out of this behavior? Some kind of mental exercise or something, im not sure really. I sometimes feel like I only have half the functions other ppl have but that half is bionic. I dont know how to wake up the other half and use them together.