I can hear CRT screens. They emit a high pitch noise that nobody else in my family can hear, I assume most people actually can hear it but never noticed it. My family used to think I was crazy or had tinnitus (jury’s still out on both) until they tested me by making me close my eyes and tell them if the TV was on while turning it off and on at random, with sound off. It was a weird test from my perspective, since I could hear it fine anyway.
So far I haven’t noticed a decay due to age, but if it had little use when CRTs were widespread, it’s now completely useless.
I used to be able to tell what refresh rate they were set to because everything below a certain point flickered. I’d ask people why their screens were flickering and they couldn’t see it.
Now that is a superpower. I’ve always thought the ability to see fast was such an interesting skill.
Think about it: you could go to the Olympics in a skillful sport like fencing or boxing, and defeat every opponent without much formal training simply because you can see them telegraph their moves. No anticipation or planning required, you just watch them come to you.
I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.
Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.
The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.
Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.
No, I have very poor hand eye co-ordination. Every time I have tried to play table tennis people have been on the floor laughing at how poor my reactions are. My eyes are just very sensitive to light.
When I lived in Canada for a year and then moved back to Europe I saw CRT TVs flicker for the first week I was back home. Even on so called 100Hz CRT TVs I saw flickering. Got used to 60Hz CRT screens so 50Hz CRTs were very noticeably
You might want to get yourself checked for Autistic Spectrum Disorder because I notice CFL tube (fluorescent tube light) flicker if I pay attention to them when no one else does
Some people with ASD are more sensitive to things other people don’t notice
Mate, there are so many things that suggest I am on the spectrum now that I have given up keeping track of them all. I’m not sure that at my time of life there’s anything that can be done for me even if I did get a diagnosis.
I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.
Got gaslit about it by my family as well.
You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.
You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.
Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.
Out of all the ways I’ve ever been told I may have autism, this is certainly the most unexpected! At a certain point I should probably get a diagnosis.
In my family’s defense, they did believe me as soon as they tested my hearing (after trying to trip me up several times, without success), so I never felt gaslit, I just felt proud of my hearing hahaha.
Yeah, I didn’t mention this in my previous post but it was annoying, for sure. I would listen to this annoying noise, nobody would hear it, and I’d eventually discovered that somebody had left the TV on.
That phenomenon is also something I saw, but never really gave it much thought, I just assumed it was just something our eyes did
Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.
I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.
Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).
… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.
There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.
My brother and I always enjoyed going out to the woods together when we were young because you couldn’t hear everything humming out there. I still enjoy it for the same reason.
My hearing isn’t even that great because I’ve spent years around loud noises (industrial and concerts) without hearing protection. But I can still “feel” cheap chargers, bad screens, and florescent lights.
A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.
Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?
You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.
But… that hum? The buzz?
Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.
Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.
Thank you. You’ve solved a mystery that bugged me since forever lol. Yay, I am not crazy. I legit thought there was something wrong with my eyesight all these years, or that they were just weird floaters. Thank you so much, friend. Relate hard to the sound stuff as well, it’s nice to know it happens to other people al well.
It’s very common for us 'spergs to have a very high frequency cut off on our hearing, all the way to old age.
I’m 43 and can still hear the bats chirping when they’re hunting insects in the twilight round the gardens. People think I’m making it up, until I point the bats out, tracking them by sound until they flutter high enough to see their silhouette against the sky.
CRT TVs and monitors used to annoy the hell out of me. The high pitched whine of the flyback transformer that runs the motion of the electron beam makes a very distinctive hiss. Like someone else on here, I could tell what refresh rate your monitor was running in by the noise it made.
That, plus an abnormally high flicker fusion frequency meant I had migraines every other day when I was working. :-/
Interesting, never knew that. I’m in my 40s and can still hear the annoying high-pitched whine from the speaker outside a shop near me that’s designed to keep kids from hanging around.
Approximately 15.5KHz. Not out of range for healthy human hearing. Most of us are damaged by noise pollution and blood pressure issues by the time we’re adults and high frequency sensitivities drop off first.
If a CRT is on in a large space with volume off, I can still hear it a bit, but mild tinnitus masks most of it.
You probably should get yourself checked for Autism Spectrum Disorder and so does anyone else who experiences anything similar
Some people with ASD have a sensitivity to things neurotypical people don’t notice
Autism is a Spectrum Disorder so not all autistic people have the same symptoms and you can’t self diagnose yourself, you need to see someone specialised for that
I can hear CRT screens. They emit a high pitch noise that nobody else in my family can hear, I assume most people actually can hear it but never noticed it. My family used to think I was crazy or had tinnitus (jury’s still out on both) until they tested me by making me close my eyes and tell them if the TV was on while turning it off and on at random, with sound off. It was a weird test from my perspective, since I could hear it fine anyway. So far I haven’t noticed a decay due to age, but if it had little use when CRTs were widespread, it’s now completely useless.
I used to be able to tell what refresh rate they were set to because everything below a certain point flickered. I’d ask people why their screens were flickering and they couldn’t see it.
Now that is a superpower. I’ve always thought the ability to see fast was such an interesting skill.
Think about it: you could go to the Olympics in a skillful sport like fencing or boxing, and defeat every opponent without much formal training simply because you can see them telegraph their moves. No anticipation or planning required, you just watch them come to you.
Do you do any competitive sport?
I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.
Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.
The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.
Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.
No, I have very poor hand eye co-ordination. Every time I have tried to play table tennis people have been on the floor laughing at how poor my reactions are. My eyes are just very sensitive to light.
When I lived in Canada for a year and then moved back to Europe I saw CRT TVs flicker for the first week I was back home. Even on so called 100Hz CRT TVs I saw flickering. Got used to 60Hz CRT screens so 50Hz CRTs were very noticeably
Yeah, if my memory is correct the flickers stopped completely for me at around 80hz. I’m talking about monitors here rather than TVs.
You might want to get yourself checked for Autistic Spectrum Disorder because I notice CFL tube (fluorescent tube light) flicker if I pay attention to them when no one else does
Some people with ASD are more sensitive to things other people don’t notice
Mate, there are so many things that suggest I am on the spectrum now that I have given up keeping track of them all. I’m not sure that at my time of life there’s anything that can be done for me even if I did get a diagnosis.
I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.
Got gaslit about it by my family as well.
You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.
You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.
Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.
So that has a name! Hahahaha There’s no way I can memorise that, I’ll keep call it “eeenergy” instead.
Good to know what it is in case someone wants a serious answer.
Out of all the ways I’ve ever been told I may have autism, this is certainly the most unexpected! At a certain point I should probably get a diagnosis.
In my family’s defense, they did believe me as soon as they tested my hearing (after trying to trip me up several times, without success), so I never felt gaslit, I just felt proud of my hearing hahaha.
Yeah, I didn’t mention this in my previous post but it was annoying, for sure. I would listen to this annoying noise, nobody would hear it, and I’d eventually discovered that somebody had left the TV on.
That phenomenon is also something I saw, but never really gave it much thought, I just assumed it was just something our eyes did
Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.
I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.
Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).
… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.
There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.
My brother and I always enjoyed going out to the woods together when we were young because you couldn’t hear everything humming out there. I still enjoy it for the same reason.
My hearing isn’t even that great because I’ve spent years around loud noises (industrial and concerts) without hearing protection. But I can still “feel” cheap chargers, bad screens, and florescent lights.
A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.
Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?
You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.
But… that hum? The buzz?
Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.
Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.
Thank you. You’ve solved a mystery that bugged me since forever lol. Yay, I am not crazy. I legit thought there was something wrong with my eyesight all these years, or that they were just weird floaters. Thank you so much, friend. Relate hard to the sound stuff as well, it’s nice to know it happens to other people al well.
I used to hear it too, now I’m old and I can’t hear anything above 16KHz, maybe less now.
Welcome to the world’s most useless club.
Used to be able to walk down the street and know who’s home watching TV by the whine (sort of like an extremely high pitched white noise).
Now CRTs are gone I’ve since realised I also have tinnitus and am constantly hearing that same sound in my left ear.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Diagnosed autistic?
It’s very common for us 'spergs to have a very high frequency cut off on our hearing, all the way to old age.
I’m 43 and can still hear the bats chirping when they’re hunting insects in the twilight round the gardens. People think I’m making it up, until I point the bats out, tracking them by sound until they flutter high enough to see their silhouette against the sky.
CRT TVs and monitors used to annoy the hell out of me. The high pitched whine of the flyback transformer that runs the motion of the electron beam makes a very distinctive hiss. Like someone else on here, I could tell what refresh rate your monitor was running in by the noise it made.
That, plus an abnormally high flicker fusion frequency meant I had migraines every other day when I was working. :-/
Interesting, never knew that. I’m in my 40s and can still hear the annoying high-pitched whine from the speaker outside a shop near me that’s designed to keep kids from hanging around.
Ah, the “Mosquito” device.
I have strong feelings on those things. Strong enough to drill holes in one while up a ladder wearing a visi-vest.
Side note: It’s amazing how invisible you become while wearing a high-vis vest and a hard hat.
An IN-visi-vest, if you will
Not as cool as Predator camouflage but just as effective.
When you have tinnitus, then you will know it. And then you probably can’t hear that CRT screen anymore.
About “crazy” I don’t know ;)
Nope, I usually hear both! 🙃
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Approximately 15.5KHz. Not out of range for healthy human hearing. Most of us are damaged by noise pollution and blood pressure issues by the time we’re adults and high frequency sensitivities drop off first.
If a CRT is on in a large space with volume off, I can still hear it a bit, but mild tinnitus masks most of it.
You probably should get yourself checked for Autism Spectrum Disorder and so does anyone else who experiences anything similar
Some people with ASD have a sensitivity to things neurotypical people don’t notice
Autism is a Spectrum Disorder so not all autistic people have the same symptoms and you can’t self diagnose yourself, you need to see someone specialised for that
I could detect it as a kid, but definitely not past 25
I can still hear the bats pinging for insects round the back gardens. I was 43 last week :-p
Some power-supplies also do this high pitch noise too and it bothers me a lot. Most people can’t hear it.
I can hear it too. Its a fuzzy buzzing noise.
You have adhd
Yeah I think everyone used to be able to hear that. Elementary school videos all the kids could hear of the teacher left the TV on in our class rooms.