Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Hard of Hearing? It's Not Your Ears, It's Your Brain | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 36 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 1) by aim on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:07PM

    by aim (6322) on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:07PM (#416665)

    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!

    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.