Understanding Your Hearing
It is your brain that hears, not your ears.
Your hearing serves many purposes such as keeping you safe, locating where sound is coming from, and helping you follow conversations. Your ears and brain form a system and work together. Your ears funnel information into the hearing system and your brain processes the information into sound and meaning.
Your brain constantly takes in a wide variety of cues from your ears, and automatically and effortlessly identifies the sounds and locates where they are coming from. Imagine you are about to step into traffic. It is your brain that lets you know whether it is safe to proceed. Therefore, it is crucial that you can hear all the sounds around you from both ears to understand where a sound is coming from.
In noisy environments, your two ears work together to improve speech understanding by providing access to the important details in the environment. The more detailed the information your brain receives the easier it is to identify and follow what is being said.
If your hearing loss is in both ears, then wearing two hearing aids is the best way to hear the most naturally.
Wearing two hearing aids – also called a binaural fitting – offers many advantages, including improving your hearing in noise, creating a more natural “stereo effect” and permitting better sound identification and localization.
Improved ability to locate sound
Knowing which direction sounds are coming from relies on having two equally functioning ears. Sounds in your environment reach the closest ear faster than the one that’s further away. This tiny difference is communicated to your brain, which then determines where the sound is coming from and how far away it is. This is important – and potentially life-saving – information. Imagine that you heard a car horn honk: if you were wearing only one hearing aid, you might not know which way to move to get out of the car’s path.
Improved comfort and natural sound
Two hearing aids allow you to hear sounds more naturally because the human auditory system is designed to pick up sound signals using both ears. Many people also find that listening with two ears is easier than listening with one because you don’t have to strain to hear with your “good” ear.
Improved hearing in noise
For people with hearing loss, it is even more difficult to hear the conversation in noise than those with normal hearing. That’s because your brain needs input from both ears to separate sounds effectively. With two hearing aids, your capacity to suppress unwanted background noise is improved, making it easier to hear conversations. Two hearing aids also allow you to keep the volume a little lower, so you hear less of the unwanted background noise.
Living with hearing loss is tiring and can affect your ability to remember.
Getting through the day with hearing loss can be hard work. Everyday situations require more effort in order to follow and understand what is being said. When you have hearing loss, your ears lose their ability to pick up certain sounds. Your brain must work much harder to “fill in the gaps” and guess what is being said.
Both tasks require more mental resources and can leave you feeling exhausted. Using more mental resources to hear leaves you with fewer resources to perform other important brain functions such as remembering what was said. So even if you manage to follow the conversation you may struggle to recall what has been said. To reduce the load on your brain, it is important that you hear all speakers clearly, especially in noisy environments.
Did you know?
Untreated hearing loss makes it difficult to follow conversations and is often very exhausting.
Untreated hearing loss often leads to reduced contact with family, friends and colleagues, which can turn into feelings of isolation and depression.
Untreated hearing loss makes it difficult to stay connected to communication and entertainment devices like TV and phones.
Give us a call today at Atlantic Hearing Clinic to find out more information.