Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

0x90.psaux.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 81 posts

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#41

Post by madspindel »

dschuetz wrote: post #30

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…

I have almost the same audiogram as well (hearing loss since birth, 32 years ago). I got hearing aids two months ago. Best decision I've made in my life! Now I can hear birds and I don't get tired when speaking with people.

Maybe you need to lower the gain? That will make it easier to wear them full-time. Now my brain have adjusted to the new sound and tbh I don't think I can live without hearing aids now.

I have Oticon Ruby with open domes.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#42

Post by dschuetz »

madspindel wrote: post #41
dschuetz wrote: post #30

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…

I have almost the same audiogram as well (hearing loss since birth, 32 years ago). I got hearing aids two months ago. Best decision I've made in my life! Now I can hear birds and I don't get tired when speaking with people. Maybe you need to lower the gain? That will make it easier to wear them full-time. Now my brain have adjusted to the new sound and tbh I don't think I can live without hearing aids now. I have Oti…

I've got my first good pair with open domes when I was preparing for university. They are still good, and I let my hearing aids be programmed so that the lowest gain setting was the most comfortable, with two directional microphone configurations for different circumstances. But still, the extra noise coming with the additional gain is wearing me out. Perhaps it's some another condition I'm not aware of. I am quite sensitive to noise despite being half deaf with ~50% loss.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#43

Post by forgotmypw17 »

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…

Anecdotally, I,ve been able to improve significantly on this by training myself to pause for a second or two before the ,,what?,,

If I give my brain that time to catch up, it,s able to put context and sound together into meaning most of the time.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#44

Post by madspindel »

dschuetz wrote: post #42
madspindel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have almost the same audiogram as well (hearing loss since birth, 32 years ago). I got hearing aids two months ago. Best decision I've made in my life! Now I can hear birds and I don't get tired when speaking with people. Maybe you need to lower the gain? That will make it easier to wear them full-time. Now my brain have adjusted to the new sound and tbh I don't think I can live without hearing aids now. I have Oti…

I've got my first good pair with open domes when I was preparing for university. They are still good, and I let my hearing aids be programmed so that the lowest gain setting was the most comfortable, with two directional microphone configurations for different circumstances. But still, the extra noise coming with the additional gain is wearing me out. Perhaps it's some another condition I'm not aware of. I am quite s…

Because of our hearing loss we haven't trained our brains to filter out noise the same way people with normal hearing have since birth. So it might be possible to train the brain, but the only way to do that is to feed more sound to the brain.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#45

Post by fallingfrog »

tgv wrote: post #21
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 backg…

I am 41 and I can still hear tones out to about 17khz. Spent a lot of time in rock shows in my 20’s too. If I knew what I had done right I’d put it in a bottle and sell it. Probably time will catch up to me too in a few years.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#46

Post by Jemaclus »

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…

(Source: I am profoundly deaf.)

Hearing loss isn't only about volume and "hearing". It's also about understanding. When you get a hearing test, they aren't just testing frequencies. They'll also ask you to repeat back words that are said to you. There IS treatment for this, and you may actually benefit from a hearing aid or some other device that would help.

Your insurance should cover a hearing test! Just get it! It's pretty painless and kind of fun. Worst case scenario? They tell you your hearing is fine and you're back where you started.

Good luck!

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#47

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

That's a bummer. It's extremely unfortunate that the moat of medical training serves as an excuse for audiologists to not listen to sound engineers; they tend to end up with excellent understanding of the human ear but very little of the underlying physics.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#48

Post by existencebox »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
phaedrus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whe…

This is something the wife and I have had many conversations about as well.

It sounds like we have an inverted situation to yours, where I was lucky to have a similar capability for visualization and spatial sense as your wife. This frustrated my wife and I to no end as she'd be driving the car and I'd say "you know you're basically riding the shoulder" and she would legitimately not realize the car was not centered. (To be clear, not from lack of attention, but from over-judging the distance from the left lane.) We had similar snips to your point about "can't you just visualize it in your head" (As it turns out, no, but I had trouble wrapping my head around that at first.)

For almost a decade this just ended up in recurring irritation and arguments whenever we drove together, until, and kinda to the point of the GP, we realized I _cannot differentiate dark objects on black backgrounds_, despite otherwise excellent visual acuity and response times. This may sound orthogonal to the car story, but to your point, after many inverses where she'd tease me about "well maybe you can't find your shirt just like I can't find the center of the road" we started to ask "wait maybe we both actually just really suck at this one class of task."

It's not quite as stark as the "can't visualize 3d fields" to be clear, but it was still a moment of "wait, we've just been living in completely different perceptual universes for a long long time now." (E.g. we'd be in a dark room, I'd walk into a wall or be unable to find anything, she would think I was making a bad joke or being obtuse.)

I tend to believe that this runs so so so much deeper than we know, and have made it the subject of some sci fi shorts that I've been hacking on. (That our mental models, ways of reasoning about the world, perceptions of reality, are truly distinct, the whole "what if what you think is green is blue to me" conundrum; and what happens when rational decisions coincide in pathological ways given varying, but individually rational and internally, although not externally consistent, perceptions)

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#49

Post by pkaye »

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…

Have you done hearing testing? How well did you do on the word recognition tests?

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#50

Post by pkaye »

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?

I have age related hearing loss with 30db at low frequency and 65db at high frequency. Surprisingly you can't tell you lost that much if it happen gradually. You just don't realize you no longer hear the birds chirping or the computer fan running. Eventually you realize you have a hard time understanding people and ask them to repeat words. When you get hearing aids you realize your brain has been trying to compensate for this hearing loss. You relied on lip movements and context more. Suddenly everything sounds much louder with hearing aids. But over time your brain adapts back.
Post reply on HN