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Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

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Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#21

Post by tgv »

fallingfrog wrote: post #4

I’m surprised that 30 decibels is considered mild hearing loss. Every 6 decibels is roughly a halving of sound pressure so if you have 30 decibels of loss you’re hearing 1/32 of the sound that a person without any hearing loss would hear. That’s not mild! This is a very cool project, I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them?

"Mild" in contrast to "severe". With a 30dB loss, you can still hear the louder noises, speech, etc. I have a 30dB loss in the mid range in one ear, just where it matters for speech. I can hear and understand people pretty well, but fail when they are whispering, or when they are speaking something else than my native language in a noisy environment. On the positive side: if I sleep on my good ear, a lot of the background noise disappears.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#22

Post by KineticLensman »

herodotus wrote: post #18
Veen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently noticed that my high-frequency hearing was going (40-yr-old man). My GF (works in a hospital) brought home a digital thermometer that beeps when it's finished a reading. My GF can hear the beeps clearly, but I cannot. She has to tell me when the thermometer is ready to be read. Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.

You should: I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.

> I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.

I started wearing hearing aides in my mid 50s and had no issues, and the positive effect on my hearing was immediately obvious (night and day, in fact). However, I think if you were much older and losing manual dexterity and visual acuity there might be problems - e.g. they can be quite fiddly to put in and clean on a daily basis. Cleaning the tube that goes in your ear is like threading a large needle with a fat wire. Steady fingers and corrected eyesight helps.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#24

Post by KineticLensman »

Veen wrote: post #10
herodotus wrote: post #5

I have age-related hearing loss: bass frequencies are ok, but high frequencies drop off. When I first got hearing aids, I thought that what they did was boost the frequencies as necessary as (I think) described by this author. But hearing is not a linear system. The hearing aids do boost the frequencies where I am deficient, but by an amount much smaller than the difference between my audiogram and normal. I think th…

I recently noticed that my high-frequency hearing was going (40-yr-old man). My GF (works in a hospital) brought home a digital thermometer that beeps when it's finished a reading. My GF can hear the beeps clearly, but I cannot. She has to tell me when the thermometer is ready to be read. Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.

> Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.

Yes, yes, definitely do. I put my exam off for years until the effect of hearing loss began to affect my work. I literally couldn't hear questions asked by quietly spoken people or in conference rooms with noisy aircon. Also, because my mother-in-law refused to wear them (she was severely deaf) and I knew how much this annoyed my wife.

I wish I had gone several years earlier! It is just great to be able to follow normal conversations, listen to birdsong, and even hear the rattles in the car. I wear mine religiously, even when on my own on the house. Just to hear the little sounds that the world makes as you interact with it.

Very occasionally I notice people looking at my ears when they have seen the aids for the first time, but this is frankly nothing compared with the embarrassment that can be caused if you ignore someone because you haven't heard them, or attempt to guess what they have said and get it wrong.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

phaedrus wrote: post #15
caeril wrote: post #9

Objectively, my hearing is just fine. I can hear frequency sweeps and tones perfectly well, but all my life I've been unable to pick out words in conversation if there's even moderate background noise. "What?" is likely my most commonly uttered phrase. This leads to people constantly telling me to get my "hearing checked", when it's not the ability to hear tones that's the problem. Rather irritating explaining this t…

I have the same issue. Worse, when I did get my hearing checked, the supposed test for difficulty picking up speech against background noise was terribly and obviously flawed. They used a very short (few seconds) clip that looped. My brain quickly learned the loop and subtracted it. What I can't do is filter out unpredictable background noise. Plus the lab is an idealized environment without distractions. Want to acc…

I hope you'll get your diagnosis eventually.

> It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening).

I feel for you. This reminded me of my recent discovery. You've probably seen this[0] image test circulating on social media the other day. Few days ago, when working with my wife through some issues between us, I showed this to her. To my utter disbelief, she scored 6. I score 2. 3 on a good day. Suddenly, both of us realized why we're getting annoyed with each other whenever talking about things like remodelling the kitchen, rearranging the living room, or planning the layout of a new flat. As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head. And she now understands that I really do need to measure everything and drop it into CAD software before I'm ready to talk.

All because of a simple test that I only remembered because I've been obsessed with my aphantasia for over a year now. This makes me wonder: how many of such undiagnosed differences of perception are there between couples, that make living together difficult, because neither side can understand the other truly perceives the world differently?

--

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#26

Post by rhubarbcustard »

herodotus wrote: post #18
Veen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently noticed that my high-frequency hearing was going (40-yr-old man). My GF (works in a hospital) brought home a digital thermometer that beeps when it's finished a reading. My GF can hear the beeps clearly, but I cannot. She has to tell me when the thermometer is ready to be read. Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.

You should: I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.

It's not really the age as such, but how long you've left an untreated hearing loss for that can be an issue.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#28

Post by skybrian »

It might be interesting to do some experiments that audiologists don’t do. In particular, music recognition, like recognizing the difference between major and minor chords.

In addition to my normal hearing loss, I sometimes have trouble with this in one ear. Fortunately it has always gone away, so far.

I suspect that some amount of this is your brain adapting to changes in hearing. Perhaps there is some way to study how people adjust to wearing new hearing aids?

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#29

Post by frompdx »

4ad wrote: post #12
caeril wrote: post #9

Objectively, my hearing is just fine. I can hear frequency sweeps and tones perfectly well, but all my life I've been unable to pick out words in conversation if there's even moderate background noise. "What?" is likely my most commonly uttered phrase. This leads to people constantly telling me to get my "hearing checked", when it's not the ability to hear tones that's the problem. Rather irritating explaining this t…

I have the same problem. As an additional data point, I have no problem hearing the dialog in documentaries, youtube shows, "casual" TV shows, etc, but I am having a very hard time understanding the dialog in movies and more serious TV shows.

It seems like around 2000 dialogue in movies and TV shows started to get quieter and quieter while action sequences got louder and louder. It's awful. I am hearing impaired and I watch everything with subtitles, however, I really don't have an issue with intelligibility of dialogue while watching older shows and movies.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#30

Post by dschuetz »

It's very interesting to read that you actually need to wear your hearing aids all the time. Because, I have the exact same condition with almost exactly the same loss curve (except at 8kHz where it's ~10dB above yours), but I only need to wear my aids in conferences or lectures (school was particularly hard). I refused to wear them and still do, because they wear me out in 1-2 hours.

Now, I have more severe problems, because of all this teleconferencing going on. Not a single smartphone I know supports what you are doing on the PC. Are there any?

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