Oh Say Can You See?

[7milesup]

After it initially occurred, and my wife would be talking to me, there would commonly be a word in her sentence that I miss understood. I would be thinking surely she would NOT say that! Sometimes my dirty mind kicked in! What was is she was saying? By the time I figured it out she had already said two more sentences which I had totally missed! What? Huh? And yes, it helps if first she slaps you in the face to get your attention. At least then you can look at her lips moving, which helps. Another problem is that she starts the sentence and then move into another room while talking..... Then there is the problem when you say you do not know what is going on... "you know I told you about this earlier." Huh?

As time has progressed I keep the closed captions on TV always showing.

You just described my life...

 

[Provincial]

Cripes. Same here, but she simply thinks that I am deaf. There is something about the female voice for me that I have trouble with (not joking). When I was flying, I was able to understand the male controllers very well but when a female controller came on the line, it was sometimes a struggle for me. Many times I would look over at the copilot and ask him what she said. Sometimes it reminded me of the last half of this Airplane clip.

There was a study done a number of years ago with retired airline captains and hearing loss. When the retirees were tasked with understanding and reading back a normal conversation, their accuracy rate was in the neighborhood of 60% or so (maybe less, don't remember). When an aviation clearance or set of instructions was read to them, their accuracy rate was literally 100% because they knew what to expect, and even if they missed a word, they were able to easily fill in the blank.

Before the jet age in aviation, there was a way to tell the airline captains that had been captains from the start of two-pilot aircraft from those who worked their way up later. The early captains were deaf in the left ear only, while the upgraded pilots were deaf in both ears!

 

[brino]

Another problem is that she starts the sentence and then move into another room while talking.....

That happened to me this morning, with the coffee pot blurbling and the radio on in the kitchen, she was still talking as she reached the bedroom at the end of the hall. There's no way I could hear that!

At least I know that I am not alone......

Brian

 

[Provincial]

Geeze Guys, I cannot hear much at all above about 500Hz (down about 25db below this frequency), even with my expensive phonak aids, and my vision continues to change for the worst. 65 years with glasses. But what are the alternatives if you want to continue to build!

Go to a real ENT hearing doctor. Get them to do a bone conduction test. It may be possible to input the sound to the bone, bypassing the normal parts of the ear.

For the vision, go to a doctor that can examine your retinas. If they are deteriorating, it is really not good. Most people lose vision acuity with age. I was always correctable to 20/15, even from 20//450. Once I hit 55, it dropped to 20/20, and is now 20/25. It sounds like time for you to seek expert help.

I ended up with an extra 42" flat screen television. I mounted it to the wall above my desktop computer desk, about four feet away from my chair, and use it for a monitor. I can see detail clearly, and focus with my far vison. I used an HDMI cable to connect to the computer.

 

[Provincial]

I've been wearing glasses for about 55 years, getting close to needing hearing aids. I have a real hard time with accents, my wife is a good interpreter.

Me, too!

In todays "woke" society, I find that being unable to understand an accent is considered "discriminatory" and there are times when I can tell that bystanders are being critical of my difficulties in understanding. They have no idea how hard it is to process unfamiliar sounds when you are deaf. Yet they are ready to criticize someone they no nothing about.

End rant.

 

[Janderso]

That is absolutely disgusting!
No wonder the industry has such a bad reputation.


Were they the ones charging more for the "extended wear" contacts that were identical to the lower-priced daily disposable lenses?


At my wife's insistence I did get my hearing checked ~5 years ago.
The results were good, but I was paying close attention during these tests.

I think the problem is that she starts talking while I am deep in thought about a work problem or shop issue.
I keep asking her to call my name and wait until I look at her before starting a sentence.

The hearing place is still pestering me to come back on a regular schedule.......

Brian

Oh there is that for sure.
I read somewhere, women listen with both sides of their brain, allowing them to multi-task, listen to the kids etc.
Men on the other hand can only hear from one side of their brain.
What does this mean? It means men can do what women do with half our brain tied behind our back
Oh boy am I gonna get it now…..

 

[Gnpenning]

Not sure if others have this problem. My ex used to give important information in a low voice, of course I couldn't hear it very well so I would say pardon me. She would supposedly repeat it in a lower voice and the cycle would repeat itself. Along with her walking away speaking softer as She moved away. She was the only one I had this problem with, during that time I worked and interacted with 50-70 different people a day and had yearly hearing tests through work, no problems. She insisted I needed hearing aids. 20+ years later it's rare that I don't hear someone the first time. The fact of the matter it was all part of her passive aggressive personality and the games she liked to play to further her victimhood.

If you are having the same hearing issues with many get help, if only one or two people review your relationship.

 

[projectnut]

From what I'm reading here most contributors aren't suffering from a hearing impairment, but rather have selective hearing. A hearing impairment is a defect in the ability to hear or comprehend sounds. Selective hearing is a defense mechanism passed down through the generations allowing a person or animal to identify and cope with possibly dangerous auditory information and fully recognize comforting or rewarding information.

Selective hearing is common among men, children, and pets. How many times have you told your children to either do something or avoid something and they do the exact opposite of what you're instructing them to do. Likewise for pets. Why is it your dog seems to ignore you when you're yelling at him at the top of your lungs to stop chewing on the shoe yet can hear the refrigerator door open from 2 rooms away. It's all a matter of selective hearing.

In many cases hearing aids confound the problem. The sounds you could once filter out as meaningless or dangerous to your health are now amplified making them harder to ignore. At one time hearing aid batteries didn't last very long allowing the user to sink back into a blissful state after a few days. More recently the lithium batteries last long enough between charges that there is little time for peace and silence.

I'm not saying that everyone out there has selective hearing, but I'm betting it's more common than most are willing to admit to.

 

[B2]

Go to a real ENT hearing doctor. Get them to do a bone conduction test. It may be possible to input the sound to the bone, bypassing the normal parts of the ear.

I can believe that for some folks the bone conduction could help, but it just depends on what is wrong with your hearing/ear. I wish this could help me.

Here is probably more than you want to know about the physics of hearing and about how my hearing decayed.

Over the years, I have been to many doctors, had many tests including the bone conduction and several others.... and some ENT and doctors know more than others. When my problems initially started I searched for one who could understand my problems. But none of them had any ideas even after running lots of tests. One of them sent me off for an MRI thinking I had a brain tumor, Nope! However the loud magnet pounding in the MRI destroyed significantly more of my hearing in one ear! So I spent considerable time trying to understand the workings of the ear and what my problems were. Below is a "little" of that.... You will not find a straight forward explanation in any book so I have come up with my own.

So here is my nickels worth. Take it as you will. You know they say you cannot believe anything that is on the internet!

More recently my ENT and the audiologist that works with him did standard hearing tests including bone conduction. Basically the bone conduction shakes the scull, shaking the solution in the Cochlea around the little hair sensors just as the sound waves would do, but less discriminately.

The air sound waves have a more complex path in via the air. Air pressure waves arrive at the outer ear drum. these then vibrate the three bones which deliver the sound energy to the inner ear drum at the Cochlea where the hair sensors line the walls. From the web: .... Outer ear drum (Tympanic) is connected to three bone like linked structures, the Hammer (malleus) - attached to the outer eardrum. Anvil (incus) - in the middle of the chain of bones. Stirrup (stapes) - attached to the membrane-covered opening that connects the middle ear with the inner ear -oval window of the Cochlea....

The Cochlea is the home to the 20,000-30,000 or so sensor hairs. The One nerve connects to each of these hair sensors and then head off to the brain for analysis. As the hair is moved by the sound waves in the liquid, the sensor is activated sending pulses down each nerve. Like most of nature the hearing evolved to be pretty much optimized. The sound wave lengths in air are quite long and so will not fit inside the inner ear. So the outer ear drum has air on both sides and so can move with the pressure wave. The connected malleus (hammer) is connected to this ear drum and so is shaken by the ear drum motion. It passe this mechanical motion on to the incus (anvil) which is then passes the mechanical motion on to the stapes (Stirrup). The stapes is connected to the Cocheal via a membrane that makes pressure waves in the Cochlea liquid. By going from air to the liquid via the mechanical connections the long wavelength of air are translated into short wavelengths of liquid (higher density shorter wavelengths). Hence the sound wave can fit into the Cochea. So I vision the hairs as grass swaying in water. Their anchoring root is at the wall of the Cochlea and this is at the connection to the individual nerve. As it moves/sways it causes the nerve to fire. The physical shape of the Cochlea determines to some degree which wave lengths arrive at which hair sensor! Hence, it works like an electronic spectrum analyzer. The farther down into the narrow part of the Cochlea only high frequencies can reach. Hence, the smaller, delicate, hairs reside here. The bigger, tougher, ones are for the low frequencies so they reside at the wider early part of the Cochlea. Since the little hairs are not suppose to move very far this is basically why they die first, especially when you have been exposed to really loud, high power, sounds. The brain knows/evolved which nerve is providing pulses and so knows high from low frequency by the sensor's physical location in the Cochlea. The brain knows the intensity/loudness by how many sensors are transmitting. If a lot of the bigger hairs are waving then their is a loud low frequency sound. Likewise for the smaller hair sensor numbers provide the intensity level for the high frequencies. As the high frequency sensors are destroyed by loud sounds (or other things like some illnesses) there are fewer and fewer of them sending real signals and so we loose sensitivity. The hearing plot (Bode plot) that the Audiologist show us, rolls off with frequency. When they are all gone we cannot hear anything at the high frequencies.

The brain gets involved. There is another function for those three connecting bones. There are two tendons/muscles connected to them. When the brain senses that the sounds are too loud and that they might damage the sensors, the brain activates the muscles, clamping down on the bones to prevent the transmission of the energy to the inner ear and protecting the sensors! For example, when a loud impulse occurs, like a gun shot or a musical cymbal the brain anticipates more loud sounds and so shuts down the hearing for a few milliseconds, but of course it is probably too late for that one sound. CD technologys use this fact in the music compression process... to store more music per disk, likewise the army uses this to protect tank operators a bit more from the explosion sounds. Just before firing a shell they send a sound pulse to the operators ears to cause the muscles to be contracted when the shell fires. The first tank operators went deaf pretty quickly. More importantly when you speak, especially loudly, or shout, the brain anticipates this loudness and protects the sensors.) The brain knows when the signal comes in one one side and so communicates to the other the other ear to cause the muscles to also react. When a nerve is activated it puts out a constant stream of pulses, only a fixed propagation velocity can travel through the nerve, and so at a fixed number of pulses per second. So neither sound amplitude nor frequency can arrive at the brain simply by the nerve's pulse rate. I think loudness comes via by the sheer number of sensors sending signals that arrive. Frequency is derived via where the sensor location in the curved shaped Cochlea. So no sensors results in no sound. Lost of sensors in only physical portions of the Cochlea causes loss of only some frequencies.

The ear, the nerves and the brain function are very interconnected and complex. A loud sound in one ear causes nerve and muscle reactions at the other ear to try protect the sensor hairs. If the protection mechanism fails then loud sounds get to the sensors and destroys them. Likewise, with old age they just fail or have been destroyed by use... which are most older folks real problems. Tinnitus (described as white noise, multiple ringing noises, or hiss) is just the multitude of nerves firing signals to the brain, when the hair sensors are no longer functioning properly to control this input. There are lots of possible symptoms and these commonly depend upon your state of well being.

That is 5 cents worth, but there is more to it if you want to search.

In my case, I suffer from TMJ, joint disorder of the jaw. (temporomandibular (tem-puh-roe-man-DIB-u-lur) joint) . All of the facial nerves, hearing, taste, smiles, facial muscles etc. pass through the skull just in front of the ear and just above or at this joint. The TMJ can cause inflammation and swelling and can so can pinch off these nerves. This is what happened to me as it pinched off the protection to the ears by not clamping down on the muscles to the bones. While lecturing my right ear suddenly started ringing very loudly. I think that the nerves and muscles to the bones were actually causing the bones to vibrate (spasm). It was a single frequency ringing... very unusual... not like tinnitus. This may have destroyed some of the sensors, but more importantly there was no longer any protection from my own talking, singing or shouting nor any other loud sound. I could even physically feel this contraction just in front of my ear. If I stroked it with my fingers sometimes the problem would get better. While I lost a lot of my hearing in my right ear from this, due to my age my left ear has now almost caught up in its degradation.

So I just do not have many functioning sensors left. However, the nerves still function as I "hear" tinnitus, especially when tired. I no longer hear the monotone ringing as those sensors are gone!

With all this in mind, what do you think is going to come of all the young folks who go to rock concerts or turn up the sound to their ear buds. The muscles to protect their ears get tired and quit functioning after a little while. It is a great picture for the hearing aid manufacturers! Likewise, when you use hearing aids you are simply turning up the volume/power to the few sensors that are left. So hearing aids probably accelerate the damage. But you have few choices.

Sorry, too long, too much sharing!

Dave L.

 

[Provincial]

Dave, I thought I remembered seeing an article about stimulating the nerves past the hair sensors to restore lost hearing. At that time (years ago) it was still experimental, so it is possible that it is practical now.

In any case, your condition is a warning that side effects of other health problems can affect sensory systems, as many COVID sufferers found from losing sense of taste.

As you point out, high-frequency loss is common from exposure to noise, In my case, I apparently protected my hearing from that, because I can still hear the birds chirp and the clocks tick quite well without hearing aids.

My wife's hearing is so acute that my kids, when young, complained that she had "bat ears!"