It can also happen with ADHD. I seem to have difficulty integrating sensory information and thinking at the same time. If it’s noisy, it causes a series of buffer overflows at every level of cognition.

Yep, I have ADHD and have always needed to put more effort toward parsing a particular sound in a dense sound field than other people. I've also always had trouble quickly identifying a particular object in a dense visual field. My wife jokes I'm "the world's worst 'Where's Waldo' player".

I can still manage to do these things but it takes longer, requires more effort and I'm generally never as good at it as others seem to be. I've always suspected these two things are related to each other and to my ADHD. There's a related audio issue I suspect is also tied to ADHD. When I'm mentally focused on a task, if someone interrupts me, I often miss the first couple words they say. Fortunately, when it happens I can usually derive the missing context from the rest of the content. Interestingly, it's not that I didn't hear the sound of the words, it feels more like a lag in mental context switching to parse the sounds into meaning.

> I've also always had trouble quickly identifying a particular object in a dense visual field.

I never considered ADHD affecting my visual processing but it very well could be.

> Interestingly, it's not that I didn't hear the sound of the words, it feels more like a lag in mental context switching to parse the sounds into meaning.

Happens to me all the time, I'm listening but sometimes my brain blips. I hear the words, but I no longer remember them by the time I'm trying to understand them.

I'm recently diagnosed, and I'm this way with auditory and visual input. If I go to a crowded sports bar with TVs, I'm basically useless.