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I am Deaf myself and using my hearing aids all of my life. One thing I discovered that silence is the best productivity focus for me. During my job, I always keep my hearing aids off. This helps with my ADHD as I am easily distracted when there is a sound involved, sometime causes me to ‘hyperfocus’ in my “world” than doing my job. And interesting that I found that keeping my hearing aids off makes the time around me become slow. With the hearing aids on, it amplified the stimulation on my brain in a way which make it feel like the time is in turbo mode.

I recently discovered this “ability” and start doing my job without hearing aids. Basically, silence is golden for me and helps a lot with my productivity.

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I also have ADHD, but not hearing problems and suffer some of the problems you describe. However, silence doesn't seem to help my productivity and sometimes makes me anxious too.

What helps me is predictable sounds - like music I've listened to many times before.

I have certain albums that I have listened to straight through many times now while getting work done. They no longer distract me basically at all, so I can work very effectively.

I have also found that certain not types of older TV shows hit the white noise level where they get me moving, but don't pull me out of my thoughts too often. This is mostly for things where the goal is just to keep moving on something, not where the goal is to think deeply.

I have similar issues with distractibility with sounds. Music sometimes helps, and white noise is good, but sometimes I’d love to be able to just turn my ears off.

The worst situation is feeling the need for enough audio stimuli to feel “right”, but that level is too distracting to allow for focus.

Agreed with you there. It is so hard to find the right sounds that could help me to focus but it turns out it made it worse. There are few sounds that does help me to focus like heartbeating, I have a 30min opus file that is purely heartbeats. I gravities toward repeating sounds because they are easier to focus as they are rhythmic. Anything that are not rhythmic will mess with my pacing.

I find that wearing hearing protector earmuffs (like the 3M Peltor Optime, which cuts 30 dB) cuts out so much sound that I feel almost stone deaf and the rest of the world goes away. It takes a little practice for them not to be disquieting, but it helps if I turn my attention elsewhere.

Very odd question, but if as a person experiencing difficulty hearing who can get partial hearing from a hearing aid, can you experience binaural beats, which are essentially non-sound neurological artifacts of the brain processing and filtering slightly different tones?

Meta analysis of them here, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 , full paper is on sci-hub.

Almost everything about binaural beats is very non-sciency and full of woo and nonsense, but if the ability to "hear" the brain artifact that doesn't register on the spectrogram of the sound caused by them were different for people experiencing hearing loss, experiencing the binaural beat "tone" in your head could indicate the persistence of some kind of physiological effect independent of direct hearing ability. If a person with reduced hearing didn't hear the binaural beat artifact, it would probably be just a harmonic or a simple wave interference pattern, and not the mysterious phenomenon it gets sold as.

I ask because they are a particular type of noise that you can use for focus and consistency to drown out other noises, similar to white, pink, rain sounds and other flavours of noise.

I am not sure if I can hear binaural beats. I tried a few of them in the past and always found them… mm what that word… like “metal rubbing on other metal” sounds which I don’t like and felt randomized. They don’t work for me. I am not sure if my hearing aids have something to do with it. Hearing aids does modify the sounds from the microphone and amplifies & output various range to get closer to “normal hearing level” to the ear. So, I don’t know if my hearing aids is outputting the binaural sounds correctly as it is intended to.

It is hard to find sound generators that would produce rhythmic beats rather than randomizing few beats here and there. Something like “beeee boop beeee boop beeee boop” or “swish bah swish bah swish bah” beats is what I prefer. My partner always looks at me funny everything I dance when my top-loader washing machine is on because it always produces simple rhythmic beats. Same for my dishwasher sounds.

Super interesting, thank you. Indeed, if the hearing aid EQ'd the input to bring out things in the range of speech, the effect in most of the artistic binaural beats tracks could be suppressed, as the effect is caused by a very specific difference between tones sent to each ear.

The beats are the artifact of directing two frequencies with a difference of only a few Hz, one per ear, and the "beat," phenomenon is a pulse we mentally feel as the result of the brain allegedly straining either to distinguish or consolidate the two tones from each ear as the same or separate. The tension between the tones does manifest as a kind of stimulation or subtle irritation, and higher frequencies could plausibly create an anxiety effect, like metal on metal you described.

Max Richter's "Sleep" is a recent artistic implementation of these, where different ones are used as a backing track throughout. I'm hacking around with reproducing them on a synth rig, but even then, the stuff written about them is mostly using pure sine waves, so even if you get interesting sound effects from other types of waves (saw, triangle, pulse, etc), there's not much in the way of empirical control.

Rare opportunity for the question to be on topic so had to ask, thank you!

It is more likely it is the hearing aids EQs are changing the sounds. Hearing aids is basically a computer in a tiny form, that why they are $2,000 to $6,000 USD each. Every hearing aids (each side of the ear) have a customized EQ for each wearer, it is conform to their hearing ability to pick up sounds. For myself, I can hear up to 2MHz and only audible at 100 dB with hearing aids. I can’t hear past 2.5Mhz range but I can feel the vibration in my cochlea. That helps me to know they are speaking outside of my frequency range. I often have issues understanding people who is using tonal language like East Asian languages, it sounds like they are speaking from a Walkman CD with skipping every 5 seconds.

Looking it up, 2khz is about C7 (c note at 7th octave), which most music is below, but you'd miss a lot of additional harmonics that could have context.

So, well into the speculative here, if binaural beats are indeed a real thing, e.g. that by offsetting a tone between two ears and frequencies it produces a third epiphenomanal artifact that is not explicitly "heard," but processed outside the range of what the ear can distinguish by the brain, it does imply we could take any sound and then modulate it so that it appeared or was realized in this meta effect range where the brain automatically processes it.

If binaural beats are not real, then there's a lot of speculative woo that automatically gets debunked. But if they are real, and there were a way to take a frequency or sound, and modulate it so that the effect could be processed by the brain as an artifact of its own processing and not as the actual physical "sound," that could be interesting. Maybe the way hearing aids EQ sounds also shifts frequencies and folds them into the range the listener can physically hear already. If there were a meta sound that binaural beats in effect claim to be, there would also be an FFT that would take a given sound input and transform it through stereo headphones to produce it at the frequency one could "hear" as an artifact of the brain reconstructing it.

I'm well into the territory of "dare to be stupid" speculation here, but the premise of creating a binaural beat to create this super-audible artifact, then modulating the artifact effect to transmit the information would be pretty interesting (probably even an ffmpeg one liner). I like cuban cigars and american whiskey if someone reading this becomes a billionare as a result of implementing it, but if it doesn't make a difference, there's a whole subculture of binaural beat internet woo that needs to know it isn't a thing. :)

I assume you mean 2 kHz, right? Normal human hearing doesn't go beyond ~23 kHz, and certainly not into MHz range.

I have ADHD, and when it works well, the hyper-focus effect is similar to what you describe with your hearing aids turned off.

But for me, the outside world's time seems to go faster, not slower. It's like the more I'm focusing on my task at hand, the less I notice the passage of time around me.

I'm curious why our hyper-focus experiences differ in that way.

My theory it is something to do with our senses. Since I have a hearing disability, so that ‘hearing’ sense is not functioning as in turn amplifying my other senses. I am going with the assumption that you are hearing (it a Deaf community lingo for people who have functioning hearings), so you have five senses operating at the same time. For me, I only have four senses operating at the same time. So with the hearing aid, my hearing sense will be “on” which maybe put more work for my brain to process everything else. Without the hearing aid, which my hearing sense is simply off. So, my brain can spend all of the “processing power” into other four senses which made me feel like the passage of time becoming slow. That is my theory is what I have so far. I don’t know if this is valid theory.

The phenomenon you're describing psychological flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Where time perception starts to skip as the brain becomes hyper focused on a task. One of the things I've noticed (having ADD) is that it's easy to enter into flow and accomplish much, but can be difficult to master what you enter flow with.

> One of the things I've noticed (having ADD) is that it's easy to enter into flow and accomplish much, but can be difficult to master what you enter flow with.

Adderall is like that for me. It works wonders, but heaven forbid I'm focusing on the wrong thing as it kicks in.

That is quite an interesting difference from me. I have to have sound or else there is absolutely no chance for me to focus. Primarily music with a lot of bass. Podcasts are bad though as that requires paying attention. Perhaps the music serves to block out other possible distractions. If you make me sit around in silence, I will be all over the place and unable to focus. It feels like I require some level of sensory input, and once that is maxed out I can actually get things done.

Funny enough, I learnt from my partner (who is hearing) that hearing peoples do not like silence or anything that are too quiet. If there is a silence between the sentence or words, people often will instinct-ly fills those silence with fluff words like “um”, “mm”, “well” to be still in turn of the conversation. If there is a silence, they will assume that it is their turn to initiate the conversation further. Deaf communities don’t use that kind of nuances and it is a culture shock for me to learn how hearing people MUST have sounds anywhere.

I wear ear plugs basically turning my ears 'off', that's the only thing that makes me productive.

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