Austin, I think you're describing hypervigilance.
I do it, too, although I don't have any history of trauma in my life, maybe you don't either. I think some of us are just wired to take in a huge amount of information at once. Hyper-vigilance goes hand in hand with difficulty falling asleep, which is a major problem I have, too.
In my humble opinion, some HG kids have a capacity to receive much more sensory input than a child is equipped to process. I think (just a guess here) that's why so many HG kids have hyper-sensitivities. (P.S. I do not have hyper-sensitivities and I'm not HG.)
I attended a fascinating brain symposium in Seattle a couple years ago that described how the cerebral cortex (oh, I think I got that right) retains memories for seven years. During that time, the memory bounces all over the cortex - the skin of the brain kind of like an apple skin - and is bumped and shaped by each new experience until, at the end of seven years, the memory is deposited into a non-malleable memory vault. So our experiences may be reframed over years' time. If something traumatic happens to us, for example, what happens over the next 7 years helps to shape how that experience affects us in the long run.
Boy, did I get off on a tangent?
