“I hear ya, even when you don’t want me to.”

What if you could not NOT hear everything around you? What if it was pouring in at equal volume, or more importantly, at an equal priority of processing?

I’m fascinated with our faculties and the mind’s abilities to filter what inputs they provide.

People have struggled with selective attention in various ways, and complications that show up from those struggles have been sometimes damning. People with a different filter have been considered mentally ill or in some way defective.

I’d argue that maybe some people filter too much. Their selective auditory attention leads them to not hear important information. (I think of my children when they’re in denial: “I never heard you say curfew was at midnight!”)

Worse, think of those who’s overall selective attention, their filters, are so attuned to singular messages that they numb themselves to even the intake of things they may not want to acknowledge. Here, I think of people who repress any mention of developing nations, starvation, or malnutrition issues even in the good ol’ USA.

So I’m working on a world-build in which some people ‘pick up’ on the thoughts of others. This is sometimes good (as you might entertain at first) but often hurtful, and at its worst, just as overwhelming as someone might experience with overstimulating sensations they cannot otherwise filter.

What have you read in fiction that relates to this? Characters who can’t regulate the extra sensory perceptions they struggle with…where they cannot NOT hear the thoughts of others? I’m interested in doing my due diligence before I go too far with this idea.

HMU in the comments.