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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: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:59AM
For me it's an autistic trait: I can't "hear" the trees for all the forest.
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).
My hearing has tested very well, but was basically told that if there is a lot going on noise wise, I have trouble picking out the 'tree' because of all the forest.
If a tree falls in the woods does it make a noise? Not if all the tree huggers are yapping...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:23AM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @10:10AM
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
sh*t... i thought everyone saw those, lol.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:31AM
@ gaark-
yes, me-tooism here...
it seems like my brain wants to give equal weight to ALL sounds coming in... my attention is constantly shifting among all the sounds... if a person is right in front of me, directly addressing me, i focus all my attention there, and the other sounds tend to get filtered out; but otherwise, i am lost in a sea of sound trying to pick out what is immediately necessary to hear...
party/gathering type affairs where a bunch of people are talking at once, are absolutely maddening: i can't hear ANYTHING because of hearing EVERYTHING... of course, this is not absolute, but it is a definite tendency...