It might be auditory processing disorder. The second more than one person is talking (and books count) I begin to crave death.

I don’t need it, strictly speaking, but I definitely prefer it. White noise is okay if I need to drown other sound out.

How else would I hear the narrator in my head?

I don’t really need silence to read, but I much prefer it.

Getting really good noise cancelling headphones was one of my best qol improvement in the last years. I often wear them without even listing to anything.

No but I need complete silence when I fall asleep trying to read a book though.

I don’t need silence, I usually read to instrumental music. But if you throw in any lyrics or speak while I’m reading I’ll look at you angrily get up and move.

I need complete silence for stuff that require precision and concentration, working and reading are the main ones. I could read manga or something in a not so quiet environment but that’s it.

Not at all.

I grew up in a big family, in a busy household. My kids laugh at me because when reading (and it really is only when I am reading) I tune out everything. They would be yelling “mom! MOM!” and I wouldn’t notice.

No. I would read on the bus. I can read in the most crazy of spaces…

The Expanse was something I was absolutely absorbed with. Each new book was magic to my imagination.

I rode public transit and had to walk a lot to get to work, through downtown Seattle

I would read and walk, I knew the best/optimal path that would have the least traffic and still get me to work on time. My bosses boss found me one day reading and waiting for the crosswalk and then crossing in rush hour traffic and it blew her mind. I was listening to the world around me but I was in that book!

No, but it depends on the sounds. I can read in a park when there aren’t people being loud. Nature tunes out. And I can read while listening to instrumental music. I can’t tune out human voices.

Quite the opposite. I read best in the corner of a busy bar, or with music in the background. I guess that’s just the AuDHD talking though.

Similarly with audiobooks, I prefer them when doing menial tasks like driving. Something that I don’t need to actively think about, but which keeps my hands busy. If I’m just listening to the audiobook without doing anything else, I’ll find myself understimulated, and I’ll inevitably reach for my phone. And then at that point I’ll stop paying attention to the audiobook entirely, which defeats the purpose. I need tasks which hit that “Minecraft parkour brain rot” sweet spot to keep me busy but not distracted.

No, but I can tune out some noises better than others. There are some noisy situations in which I simply cannot get through even a single sentence.

I have tinnitus that makes concentrating on anything in complete silence absolutely aggravating. The tiniest bit of background noise makes it so I don’t notice it anymore, so I generally have an instrumental playing when I need to focus on something like homework or reading.

Nope, my hearing is waaaaay too selective. I can get engrossed in a book even in loud environments.

This isn’t quite what you’ve asked, but I’ve found two things over the years:

• Familiarity matters. I remember that as a kid, I didn’t listen to music when doing homework. I couldn’t understand how people could manage. Later, I used music on headphones in a work environment to drown out noise that was more-distracting, and it wasn’t an issue once I got used to it, could write software without problems with music. I remember reading that some people say that they can’t concentrate when it’s too quiet, if they’re accustomed to being in a noisy environment, because the silence becomes a distraction.

• The type of noise matters. I don’t require white noise, but in terms of how-distracting something is, I’d say that my ranking is something like silence > white-noise-type stuff > “ambient” sounds like waves or wind > lyric-free music > music with lyrics > speech > half of a conversation.

  By “half of a conversation”, I mean a conversation in the background where I can only hear one end. This usually comes up when someone is talking on a cell phone in a public place in the background. I think that what’s going on here is something like that we’ve trained ourselves so that if someone says something and then there’s no response, it means that they’re talking to us, and so we’ll say “huh?” and look up. It’s good that that happens. Unfortunately, that’s also the effect one gets when one can only hear one side of a cell phone conversation. Just a constant series of attention-grabbing events for me. I’d rather have two people talking to each other near me than one person on a phone, even though it’s technically more speech.

  Generally, I prefer “lyric-free music or better” when doing something that requires concentration, but can live with music with lyrics.