Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people's hearing problems?
bbc.com
bbc.com
This sort of injury, with the missing sensory input, triggers brain plasticity. A lot of relearning goes on very quickly. It took only a few days until voices stopped sounding like chipmunks because I could not hear the low frequencies. I still couldn't hear them but I was starting to associate the new inputs with my memories of how I remember speech sounding. If I knew the person the voice was strongly gendered as male or female - with new speakers I had trouble guessing their sex. I still do.
From what little is known about this, exposure to sound is crucial during this phase. And a lot of people find it highly distressing. I was gripping my hands like in a panic/stress reaction when out in public in noisy environments. It is, paradoxically considering the quasi-deafness, a kind of sensory overload. Sounds I couldn't identify, coming from the wrong direction, with human voices sounding like garbled squeaks. A common reaction is to withdraw. But this almost certainly prevents relearning during the crucial phase of plasticity. I wish I had forced myself to go to more restaurants etc. immediately after, in hindsight. I suspect it may have resulted in less tinnitus long-term if I had done so.
This is so little studied it surprised me how little is out there when I went researching on what the best conditions to expose myself to after. I kind of had to make up a protocol myself.
Huh. Charles Bonnet syndrome?
This leads them to be an ideal breeding ground of bacteria, and a constant source of ear infections. I'd say that's something that can pretty directly lead to hearing loss.
What resonated with me is if it can be sensitized one say, neuroplasticity can desensitize you the other way just as slowly.
Maybe buy headphones that let you adjust the level of noise cancelling gradually.
At the same time, noise pollution is a real issue and more of a drag on people's energy than realized. Using excellent ear plugs for short burts at a time is also useful for that reason.
Maybe it's a good thing noise cancelling ear buds could only have 5 hours or so of battery life at a time for both ears.
And heaven forbid I try to speak a word or two while typing. Very often I type what I meant to say, and vice versa.
As far as anecdata, I've worn noise-cancelling headphones at least 40 hours a week for the past 18 years. Granted, my formative years pre-date noise cancellation, but I haven't noticed any impact to my hearing or audio processing. Pretty sure I'd be listening to music much louder without noise cancellation.
I agree that I have taken care of my hearing despite doing what I want for the most part.
Now with small aliens roaming the homestead, being able to tune it out to access the well developed trained focus mode is useful.
At the same time, I'm not sure if anyone's using apps like Brain.fm or Endel to help keep some noise going to the brain, just not silence.
I have used brain.fm for a lot of years when I'd remember to (meaning I needed it), and recently started experimenting with Endel, which has been more useful than I anticipated.
I want to say it's normal, but it's also known as sensory or auditory processing disorder and it's not uncommon in neurodiverse people. Learning some lip reading or just observing someone's mouth movements helps me in those situations, but it's far from ideal.
This seems like basic speculative attribution error- no research here.
Thankfully I'm not regularly in an environment that force me to wear noise cancelling headphones.
Sometimes I believe this was caused by my childhood bedroom being soundproofed, but I still went to noisy public school so who knows.
I have this to far less extremes: I've always sought quiet. There nothing wrong with my hearing as tested. I can't hear people talk very well in any kind of busy situation, and it at least seems to me that other people there aren't struggling. Of course they could be and they just don't say anything about it.
This can also be attributed to enshittification. Restauranteurs and bar owners found that noisier places increase turnover and cause people to drink more.
On the other hand I've been in one or two restaurants with really good acoustics. You could easily have a conversation in those even at the busiest of times. If there's no reverb your voice doesn't bounce all around the room. Your table can hear you perfectly fine, but you're basically inaudible to someone a few tables over. The background noise sounds like a pleasant murmur instead of a loud cacophony.
Interesting if true...
not sure if it is by design, but a larger window would potentially decrease computational load since it doesn't need to recalibrate and reprocess at a higher rate.
I honestly think that noise-cancelling is a great idea for a technology, and is basically required from a marketing perspective, but not all that helpful in practice. Sound isolation isn't is sexy, but it works much better.
Note that there are different kinds of noise-cancelling headphones. The ones pilots wear are different, and then you have those made for hunters - they are focused at reacting very fast to sounds from shooting.
Didn’t fully appreciate it until I noticed my screaming baby (96 decibels) was inaudible not much more than an arms length away…
I get bouts of this from wearing sealed headphones for too long (not specifically noise cancelling headphones but pretty relevant since noise cancelling headphones almost always form an airtight seal with the ear to work so they too fall into this category).
I think for myself there's certain atmospheric conditions that lead to the otoconia (the crystals that cause it) irritating my hearing and sealed over the ear headphones are a huge cause for me.
Might be worth looking into. The treatment for BPPV is to move your head in specific ways to shake the crystals out which is damn simple to do too so if it is the cause it's actually quite treatable.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
For what it's worth, I've used subtitles whenever possible ever since that became a thing, more or less with the advent of DVDs, which was in my teens to twenties. But I do also have childhood hearing damage in one ear.
Not about hearing, I think it's a way of being and trust me I'm not the only one noticing this.
We've even had talks with HR to see how we could adapt as honestly I thought at some point I was the one with challenges transmitting things.
Listening to everyone and everything in many instances is critical to problem solving...
Anyone else?
> "You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it," she said.
Ah yes, the natural peaceful environment of car horns blowing at >100 decibels.
Look, any research in any medical condition is always useful. But the entire article doesn't mention a word on the real problem: the world has just gotten too damn loud. Car horns are loud enough to cause hearing damage even at short exposure, as is extended exposure to traffic. So yeah, maybe we should primarily be looking at the modern hellscape that we've created instead of looking at the ways people use to manage this.
Overtime I got more electro sensitive and when there are to many wireless devices around me I get a type of temporary tinnitus which persist for a while. Grounding myself helps to relieve it.
I mean think about it couple of decades ago there wasn’t even one wireless device around now I receive alone 40 router signals in my apartment building. When everybody is at home in the evening I feel the electro smog tinnitus the strongest.
Edit: But the article is also about understanding speech in a noisy area. Wouldn't ADDH be a big factor ?