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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   
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.

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Original Submission

• Sounds about right Sounds about right (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday October 20 2016, @01:37AM

  by Snotnose (1623) on Thursday October 20 2016, @01:37AM (#416431)

  When I was a kid (1960s) I had a series of tubes put into my left ear due to repeated ear infections. It left me with a heavily scarred eardrum, and I have about 50% hearing in the left ear. If you say something and I'm not paying attention I won't hear you, but get my attention and I'll hear you fine.

  FWIW, it came out some 20 years ago that putting tubes in kid's ears did more harm than good.

  We won't go into the rock concerts I went to in the 70's (Ted Nugent advertised as the loudest, he was right).

  --
  I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.

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• Re:Sounds about right (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:00AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:00AM (#416436)

  (1960s) I had a series of tubes

  You had your own internet in the 1960s!? I'm impressed.

  Parent