We call it parsing. You might have heard everything but your brain wasn't done with parsing.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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I just gotta replay the recording in my head again, then I can respond.
Echoic memory! Gotta be quick, ya only got a few seconds to hit that replay button
Hm?
Omg this is so me bruh
Tbh, is because I was probably thinking of something else and needed a second to remember what you just said.
Usually goes something like, "Huh? Oh, blah blah"
I wish people would get my attention before just blurting out random gibberish and acting offended when i take a moment to go from “LoRa use cases” in my head to “whatever bullshit you read on facebook today”. people are just boring imho.
This is a regular argument in my house. My wife gets so upset that she has to repeat herself because i dont catch it the first time. Ive tried to tell her that she could even just start with "hey" or something to get my attention before she brings me into the conversation thats been going on in her head for 10 minutes already.
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Nope, uno reverse card on this one.
People who think its weird to 1) express shock at a question and then 2) formulate an answer after they mulled it over a bit?
That isn't weird at all.
What is weird is being incredulous at this phenomenon.
It implies at least one of a few things:
That you think anyone who says 'huh?' is indicating that they didn't understand the literal words and meaning of question as spoken... not that they did understand it literally, but are expressing surprise that that question was asked, or any other possible thing that could be conveyed by 'huh?', maybe disgust, maybe horror, maybe annoyance, maybe nearly anything, etc.
That not having an instant response to any concievable question is abnormal.
Those things could imply that the person who thinks this way is impulsive, not inclined to deliberate or consider potential outcomes before acting/speaking, and/or also overconfident about their ability to understand language and expressions.
Also could imply they have a tendency toward totalizing, not being precise, not considering nuance or context.
IE, a person who genuienly holds this belief is more likely to be offended by their own / innocent misunderstandings, and is more likely to act rapidly, without hesitation, as well as potentially in a more severe way.
... like a psychopath.
Uno!
EDIT:
Sorry, I had to expand this a bit as I went... you know, because I thought about it more.
I think you nailed it. Some people make very shallow observations, then use them to criticise others. I assume this is an attempt to make themselves feel superior.
All they're really showing is they're not particularly bright.
Some of us autists actually have very high "EQ", we just aren't always choosing to be as expressive or dramatic as some others seem to need.
Yes! Autism is partly social difficulty, but that is not the same as a lack of social/emotional perceptivity. The difficulty is mutual among all parties.
I totally ’get’ what is going on in most social encounters, I just feel very little obligation to expend the energy to match the situation quite often.
Lately, I have become more ‘demanding’ socially. It’s working fine, and my attitude has become ‘I will meet people halfway’ in terms of working to accommodate the group vibe.
Quite often, others will sus out my wavelength too and it results in them doing more of their share of the ‘work’ of socializing. If not, well, I am better off learning that they won’t do their share.
I have lately become utterly fine with who I am. I am the normal one, conform to me.
I think we need to culturally go back to roughly Daria as a metaphor for / example of autism.
She can see through basically every social situation, almost always reads them with more accuracy and insight than everyone else, is analytical, witty, deadpan, detached... but still has and is capable of expressing emotions.
Thats a high functioning autist to me, the difference to nowadays is... nobody really had a widely used (and often misused) pathologizing term for that in the 90s, and hadn't spent 20 yrs infantalizing such people as socially stunted, so Daria had actual self confidence and wasn't stigmatized.
I had tons of friends growing up, they just thought I was quirky... nobody knew I was autistic till I figured it out in my 30s.
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As a person with ADHD, who does this frequently, I can attest that it is more of a processing delay coupled with an autonomous communication thread than psychopathy.
By the time my cortex processed the input, the verbal center already responded thinking there was incomplete input. I figure the problem is mostly due to ADHD.
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I just hate when you genuinely miss the first few words and they only repeat the last part.
Mghdn tjrinc hrjdk Cookie, did you?
Huh?
Did you?
Did I what?
Eat my cookie?
For me it's "did you hysye6du3h my cookie?" "I'm sorry, did I what your cookie?" They go into an in depth explanation and definition of eat. "No, no, the word, I just need the word. I heard everything except the one word" "Oh, eat. Did you eat my cookie?" "How did you mumble eat into 3 syllables? And no I didn't eat the cookie... it might have been the cat though"
Could be worse: "never mind."
One cool reason for this is that auditory input lasts longer in your mind than visual. I don't know if we've tested touch, smell, or taste, but maybe someone else has those research articles ready.
Vision lasts for something under a second. You can test by flashing a grid of numbers, say 5x5, up on a screen for a very brief period of time, and then cue the subject to recall a specific line after a period of time. There are too many numbers to instantly memorize, too many (more than the 7 +/-2 limit we typically see) to rehearse to remember all of them, and the subject doesn't know which line to rehearse anyway, so they can't repeat all the numbers to 'win.' I remember that the time until decay was something like a second. Up to that point, a subject could repeat all the numbers in a line if cued.
Auditory was tested in a similar manner, but I can't quite remember the details. Maybe something like a high/medium/low voice, and then being cued? Anyway, time for decay for the sensory input was something like 4-8 seconds. Most people have probably had an experience where they were working on a task, a coworker or roommate came up and asked them what they wanted for lunch, and the reply was, "hang on a second, let me finish this," they finish the (very brief) task, turn to the other person and say, "what did you say?" while screwing up their face in memory and then answer the question without it being repeated.
As an interesting aside, chimpanzees have amazing visual recall from brief cues. I remember videos of them being able to memorize a sequence of 20+ squares to press on a grid after the correct sequence had been flashed up for a split second.
And the Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis would say we gave up that ability to get complex language.
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The human brain also generally responds faster, with lower latency, to audio input than it does to visual input.
This is why actual pro gamers will prioritize a positionally accurate, low latency audio setup at least as much as, if not more than a ludicrous visual framerate that goes far beyond the human ability to perceive.
When I worked at RadioShack (late 00's), I would get so tunnelvisioned doing things like planograms or putting away orders, and not really reacting when people talk to me...and I would do this constantly.
My manager at the time referred to it as "buffering", and I don't think there's a better term for it.
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What about people who say
"You'll never guess what happened at work today?"
So you respond with
"What?"
Then they repeat the question
It's best to respond with something absurd and physically impossible, like "gravity paused and everybody just floated for a second?"
Well you didn't guess...
If I replied with
"You got sacked for gross misconduct?"
They'd say
"What?"
Full circle I guess
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correction people who say huh when you are 𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 a question and then cut you off by saying "oh I know" are psychopaths. Of course you know dumbass I just told you, if you actually knew why did you ask
I'm schizophrenic, which isn't good for my case here bubs, I know, sociopathic psycopothy, but I often times use this as a long term memory device to get me to remember things better, aswell as move to a space where, 'hey, now I know, this is surprising, cool' because I do have mental issues and overstimulated sensory issues, so, yeah, love you, I'm totally a dumbass, just how some people are
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The correlation with psychopathy is a bit unclear to me here.
First person is just being an overactive fool and using psychopath as more 'insane'
Huh? I mean, damn, lots of comments are wild. Just let people breathe a bit. Sometimes I'm also only realizing one or two things after I started talking. Sometimes even mid-sentence. And also, maybe for some people "huh" is just an instinctive reaction they burp out randomly. Also I go with the "what's huh after all" comment. Maybe they just abstracted the meaning of it in those simple letters. Maybe "huh" means a world to them
That sounds an awful lot like projection the first person is doing.
So many types of people you can insult and you choose people who think?
Between my ADHD and my hearing being shot from going to so many raves when I was younger, have some patience plz.
I’m not following this at all
There exists a type of person that, when asked a question, will immediately respond with "Huh?" and then answer quickly after. I am one of those persons. A lot of people with ADHD have this quirk because it's like our brain is "loading" the new request and we're snapping into things.
The first part of the post is someone calling those types of people psychopaths because they don't get it. The second part of the post is someone more or less explaining what I did but in a way shorter fashion and without the context.
pro tip! just let the other person repeat themselves even though you already have your answer loaded. this gives you some advantages:
- avoid answering what you think they asked the first time and answer what they're actually asking
- opportunity to re-evaluate your answer as they repeat the question and make sure you still like it
- after they repeat the question you already have an answer ready to go which makes you seem like you've got a high degree of expertise in the field even though it's just that you heard them the first time but were still processing
The issue lies with the fact that is is not a conscious decision. It just... happens.
I tried this a while ago, unfortunately I would go off into something else in my head again and completely lose track of the answer I had at the ready.
So what I started doing to avoid that (but still hit points 1 & 2) is ask what I thought was the question back at them (in short form).
That seems to work well for me, maybe it will for others.
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It me. My wife hates it. It my son too.
Ohhhhhhhh. This is not a feature of my particular flavor of neurodivergence. I will note this for future reference.
My brain takes two attempts to analyze what was said sometimes? Either I'll have no clue what was said or I'll think something nonsensical was said, but it takes a bit for that second attempt at processing to happen and sometimes I respond based on the initial pass because I think I need you to repeat it.
Do you just understand things immediately generally or do you lack echoic memory, preventing you from making a second processing attempt?
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The worst is schroedinger’s auditory buffer. (Heisenbuffer?)
If you give me a second to parse what you said, I can reply just fine. If you ask “are you listening?” in an aggravated tone, the buffer gets discarded instantly.
And this is completely orthogonal to whether I was trying to pay attention to your words, cuz I basically can’t process your words directly as you speak anyway.
So I might have an easier time continuing the conversation if I’m mildly distracted instead of constantly overwriting the perfectly understandable stuff from 5 seconds ago with the white noise that I’m hearing in the immediate present.
ohh you absolute idiot, if you paid attention in science class you would know that light travels faster than sound: we see your mouth moving but don't hear anything first so we say "huh" but at that point enough time has passed for the sound to reach our ears, therefore we can answer without need for repetition.
Hey, it's not my fault you interrupted my train of thought when I am half an hour deep on a topic/problem.
Takes a second to actually parse what you said.
Yeah so
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