It’s easy to take hearing for granted.
A podcast playing in the background. Your kids making animal noises and debating who gets to be the cheetah. An orange Maine Coon cat purring in your lap.
But what if the sounds start slipping away?
“By age 80, something like 80 percent of adults will have hearing loss,” said Northeastern Bouvé College of Health Sciences professor Jonathan Peelle.
Isn’t that what hearing aids are for?
It’s not that simple.
Say you’re in a crowded restaurant. Voices, clattering dishes and the live band in the corner might blur into one sea of sound. This makes it hard to pick out what you actually want to hear — words being addressed to you.
If understanding speech in a noisy environment were just about making it louder, hearing aids would do the trick, said Bridget Carey, a Ph.D. student in Peelle’s lab.
But hearing loss doesn’t just boil down to volume. The challenge is also untangling speech signals from the rest of the auditory vinaigrette for the brain to process. You also have to remember who said what and hold up your end of the conversation.
Read more at Northeastern Global News
Illustration by Renee Zhang
