The Overlooked Role of Sensitivity in Schizophrenia, Mental Health, and Trauma
Mental Health Series — Sensitivity Part 2
Mental Health Series — Sensitivity Part 1
Aural Sensitivity (physical)
Let’s begin with an example of aural sensitivity, or heightened sensitivity to sound. I recently visited my doctor to address Achilles pain, and during our conversation, I mentioned how my hearing is so sensitive that I can hear everything around me, which often prevents me from sleeping. He pointed to his hearing aids and said, “Well, that’s certainly better than this.” But is it really?
In general, I hear everything happening around me, even when I don’t want to. As a teenager, I couldn’t sleep in the same hotel room as my father because of his loud snoring. I would often retreat to the bathroom, close the door, and sleep on the floor to escape the noise. I can also hear the furnace in my house as it goes through its cycles. First, the exhaust motor kicks on for about a minute before the main fan, which emits a high-pitched whine. If I focus on it, the sound becomes increasingly irritating. However, if I’m asleep, it usually doesn’t bother me. The more I focus on the whine, the louder it seems to get, as if I can intensify the sound through conscious effort. I imagine that dogs might also hear this high-pitched noise, but most people likely do not.
At night, I can hear the sounds of the fridge or freezer motors as they ramp up through various levels of activity depending on the cooling needed. I hear the expansion and contraction of the vents when the furnace kicks on and they hit the surrounding framing — thankfully, that noise has subsided, and I haven’t heard it this year.
When I was dealing with skunks under my backyard deck, I used cayenne pepper to deter them, and I could hear their distressed cries at night after they stepped in it. At the dinner table, I often hear emergency sirens before anyone else, and when I mention it, my middle son — who is also highly sensitive (as are all three of my children) — says he hears it just as I do. One night, as we turned off the lights, a strange intermittent noise bothered me in the quiet. I could only hear it when I slept on my side with one ear covered by the pillow. It turned out to be the electrical hum of a USB charger for a new trimmer that was plugged into the outlet next to our bed.
During the day, I often have difficulty hearing what people are saying, not because I can’t hear them, but because the ambient noise is so overwhelming that it drowns out their voices, making it hard to isolate their speech. For me, even the sound of silence is somewhat loud — it’s like a soft buzzing that I hear or feel in my ears. I first noticed this when we took a vacation to Vancouver about 20 years ago and visited Banff. We took a gondola ride above the tree line, and the first thing I noticed when we stepped out was the overwhelming sound of silence for the first time in my life. It felt like a pressure had been lifted from my eardrums, and it was incredibly soothing, much like the relief you feel in your muscles after a deep tissue massage following a hard workout.
These examples illustrate my subjective experiences of aural sensitivity and how my hearing has been far from normal throughout my life. To provide a more scientific explanation, I collected some data using an Android hearing test app called “Hearing Test” by Marcin Masalki (version 2.4), on my Samsung phone with Marshall IV Bluetooth headphones.
First, I’ll share the results of a hearing test from a co-worker in their early 30s. They reported having an ear infection and blocked hearing in one ear. The red and blue lines on the chart indicate the different ears, while the green trend lines represent normal hearing by age. The left side of the chart shows sound levels in dB, and across the top, from left to right, are the frequencies in Hz, with the left side showing low Hz sounds down to 250 Hz and the right side showing higher frequencies up to 8000 Hz. The chart highlights the differences between their normal ear and the ear affected by the infection and blockage.
Next, I’ll share a sample from my 92-year-old mother, who helped me edit this paper. She doesn’t use hearing aids, and her hearing is better than expected for her age.
Finally, here are multiple samples of my hearing from October 14, 2023, and March 23, 2024. I am now 52 years old and would typically expect some hearing degradation. However, my recent tests show that my hearing may be even more sensitive than in the previous test. This could be due to reduced ambient noise or differences in calibration, but it seems that my ears struggle to distinguish between complete silence and the minimum sound emitted from the speakers.
This is an example of aural sensitivity. Now I understand why I hear emergency vehicles from blocks away before others and why New York City has always been a challenging place for me to visit. The constant noise and bustle place a high and continuous aural load on me, even at night, disrupting my sleep patterns. The size of the city you live in has been shown to be a direct and proportional risk factor for schizophrenia — the larger the city, the higher the risk.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that all the songs on my playlists feature music with a high degree of clarity, fidelity, and tonal richness, usually involving traditional classical instruments. They also tend to have minimal background noise and clear tones. I tend gravitate toward artists like Whitney Houston, Pentatonix, Andrea Bocelli, Sarah Brightman, Adele, Rihanna, Pink, Leona Lewis, Alicia Keys, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Sia, and others. When I listen to their music, it feels as though it activates my brain, often giving me goosebumps all over my body. This is how highly sensitive people experience music — we perceive all the tones, nuances, instruments, and details.
