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"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.
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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday October 20 2016, @06:29AM
Maybe it's not a disorder at all.
Maybe it's a learned technique of discrimination between pointless blabbing of people around you so as to be able to hear the cracking twig, or the footsteps on the stairs. Then the pregnant pause and the stare of expectation alerts you that you tuned out too much.
With advancing age you've heard all the stories a hundred times, but that won't stop the retelling. You learn to listen around the noise or stop listening all together, to protect your own sanity.
Just because people stop listening to you doesn't mean you get to make up another DSM V code to describe a new disease.
Whippersnappers!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by aim on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:07PM
I'd add that it may also depend on your mastery of the language spoken. Way back when I was at university, in a foreign country, with their own special dialect of a language that I do master, I had to concentrate quite extremely to follow a conversation in a bar - where I'd have had much less trouble in my own language, or the "main variant" of this particular language.
These days I also tend to tune out irrelevant stuff, or I'm simply concentrating on something other and thus don't follow what's being said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:26PM
I was diagnosed with APD about 20 years ago: my hearing was perfect, but I couldn't spell phonetically because I'd "miss" certain sounds. This would also happen when reading (the part of the brain that interprets sound is needed for this) aloud because the problem was neurological and had nothing to do with my ears.
A teacher noticed the problem because she was convinced that I was cheating on spelling tests because my practice scores were around 10-20% and my test scores were either the same (didn't study) or 90-100% (when I'd memorise the sequence of letters for each word). The teacher was still convinced that I was cheating, somehow, even after she would give me the tests separately, so the administration got involved and a counselor contacted some specialist.
The test involved a standard hearing test (the kind with headphones and beeping noises with different volumes), a reading test with fake words (to control for literary), and a spelling test with similar fake words. The test results were very clear, but the only thing that changed was that the teacher let me take the tests with the class again and would congratulate me when I'd do well.
Listening requires all of my focus (no taking notes or multitasking) and I have to ask people to repeat themselves very often. I've worked hard to compensate by reading a lot and improving my listening skills, but I can understand that many would not be as motivated.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:49PM
In fact, that age bracket belongs to men with long exposure to toxic sources: wife, bratty daughter and mother in law.
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