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Hard of Hearing? It's Not Your Ears, It's Your Brain

posted by janrinok on Thursday October 20 2016, @01:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the what? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

"Could you repeat that?" The reason you may have to say something twice when talking to older family members at Thanksgiving dinner may not be because of their hearing. Researchers at the University of Maryland have determined that something is going on in the brains of typical older adults that causes them to struggle to follow speech amidst background noise, even when their hearing would be considered normal on a clinical assessment.

In an interdisciplinary study published by the Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers Samira Anderson, Jonathan Z. Simon, and Alessandro Presacco found that adults aged 61-73 with normal hearing scored significantly worse on speech understanding in noisy environments than adults aged 18-30 with normal hearing. The researchers are all associated with the UMD's Brain and Behavior Initiative.
...
Why is this the case? "Part of the comprehension problems experienced by older adults in both quiet and noise conditions could be linked to age-related imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory neural processes in the brain," Presacco said. "This imbalance could impair the brain's ability to correctly process auditory stimuli and could be the main cause of the abnormally high cortical response observed in our study."

In short, they think signal processing is to blame, not signal transmission.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:23AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:23AM (#416462) Journal

    My son and I notice the French fry alarms going off in fast food restaurants (he used to cover his ears... when my wife asked why, I said it was probably because of the alarms, which she hadn't noticed).

    After only a year of running a 35mm two-projector setup, which used multiple reels, I noticed the cue marks for years afterwards when watching movies on the TV. No one else watching the movies with me saw them. Nowadays, movies don't have cue marks for me to notice.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @10:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @10:10AM (#416552)

    Thanks for the searchable term; after looking it up I finally found out after so many years what these strange symbols are for.

  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:56AM

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:56AM (#417480) Journal

    sh*t... i thought everyone saw those, lol.

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