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You Hear With Your Brain |
Did you know that you don’t hear with your ears — you, in fact, hear with your brain! Your hearing nerves carry electricity to your brain, where you actually hear. That is why it’s important to wear your hearing aids on a consistent basis — you are keeping your brain in practice to hear various sounds. It is like exercising a muscle. If you don’t exercise, you lose muscle tone, and your muscles weaken and are ineffective in performing various functions. Hearing is like that. The more you wear your hearing aids, the better your brain gets at recognizing words.
The following is taken from an article in the Hearing Journal, written by Dr. Robert L. Martin, Ph.D. Thought many of you would find it pretty interesting!
"WEAR YOUR HEARING AIDS OR YOUR BRAIN WILL RUST ..."
You don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain.
Let's explain: You don't feel with your fingers; your fingers make electricity, which is carried to your brain through nerves. You 'feel' with your brain.
Your ears make electricity that is carried to your brain through your hearing nerves. You 'hear' with your brain, not your ears.
Hearing aid use is like exercise. If you want to get your muscles in shape, you need to exercise them every day. Conditioning the auditory cortex of the brain is much like conditioning leg muscles. It's impossible to sit on a couch watching TV all week and get healthy leg muscles. What you get are weak legs.
When you wear your hearing aids, lots of good things happen. You get used to the feeling of wearing the hearing aids. You get used to all the funny sounds. You start hearing better.
It takes time for the brain to learn to recognize words through the hearing aids. Learning to listen to amplified sound is like trying to understand people who speak with an unfamiliar accent, like the actors in British dramas on TV. At first, the words seem garbled. But slowly, they become clearer, easier to recognize.
Wearing hearing aids in noisy listening situations also takes time. It is not easy to listen to one person when lots of other people are talking at the same time. But with practice you get better.
Wearing hearing aids even helps short-term memory. If I tell you my name is Dr. ...ru..p..., you'll know you didn't hear the name correctly so it won't register in your brain. But if I say my name is Dr. Grump, you'll think, "Wow, that's a weird name!" and you will probably remember it.
The more you listen with hearing aids, the better your brain gets at recognizing words.
When a person does not hear sounds, the tonotopical mapping of the cortex in the brain begins to change. The longer a person avoids wearing hearing aids, the more difficult it is for them to learn to hear through them. In truth, wearing hearing aids improves word understanding in almost all situations, and not wearing them results in an unnecessary loss of speech information.
When people have poor hearing ability, they also tend to develop poor listening habits. Paying attention to difficult signals is frustrating for them, so they tend to shut themselves off from others and stop trying to hear. But, using hearing aids reconnects these people with family, friends, the rest of the world, and it makes all avenues of communication easier.
Taken from the article by Dr. Robert L. Martin, Ph.D., The Hearing Journal, January 2004, Vol. 57, Number 1, p. 46.
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| (Article 0205, originally published February 2005) |
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