Why Hearing Aids Won't Give You '20-20' Hearing

Time To Read: 7 minutes

You have poor eyesight, you get corrective lenses. Why can’t the same be done for poor hearing?

Great question! Unfortunately poor hearing is not the same as poor eyesight.

Improved hearing involves placing a second set of lenses over your eyes as either glasses or contact lenses. And spectacles, as we know them, were around at least since 1290 AD. Employing the concept of convex lenses to enlarge objects was known at least as far back in the second century AD and was written about in Ptolemy's book called Optics.

Hearing is a more complex set of physiological and neurological processes and involves two important key areas - your ears and your brain.

And compared to glasses, hearing aids is relatively new technology.

Your ears are complex and the way it deals with sound is truly amazing.

Sound enters the ear and causes the eardrum to move.

Those sound vibrations move through a chain of small bones, called the ossicles, to the snail shaped structure called the cochlea.

There is fluid in the cochlea and when it moves in response to sound, it causes hair cells to bend. Hair cells at one end of the cochlea send low pitch sounds and hair cells on the other end send high pitch sounds.

Those hair cells cause neural signals to be sent to the brain via the auditory nerve.

Then it is up to the brain to interpret the sounds.

As we grow older (or as a result of injury, illness, or extensive exposure to loud sounds), the hair cells in your cochlea die off.

The hair cells that detect high frequency are the ones most buffeted in day-to-day life and are the first to die off. This is why high frequency sounds - that help us understand speech are difficult to hear as we get older.

To add complexity to the equation, the longer someone goes with unaddressed hearing loss, the more difficult it is for the brain to remember to correctly interpret sound.

About 30% of people over 50 have some form of hearing loss. That number rises to 50% for those over 70.

So as you can see, addressing hearing loss is not the same as getting new glasses.

But there is good news

The good news is that great advances have been made in addressing hearing loss. Today’s hearing aids do more than increase volume across the board. Hearing aids are miniature computers, especially programmed to address the specifics of your hearing loss.

Even more than that, they’re also clever enough to recognise what sounds you need to hear (like a conversation in a noisy room) and what sounds you don’t need to hear (like wind noise).

This is why it is vital that your test include a speech in noise component.

Now at the issue of the ears has been addressed, let’s take a look at the brain.

Have you ever received a new glasses prescription or tried on a pair of multifocal lenses for the first time and experienced a bit of vertigo?

That’s because your brain is trying to process what the eye is now seeing. Optometrists say it can take between two and six weeks to get used to wearing multifocal lenses, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it takes that long to get used to wearing hearing aids.

Did you know that the longer you hearing loss goes untreated, the more likely it is your brain will forget what particular sounds mean? The old adage is true  - Hearing Loss - Use It Or Lose It. We explore the topic here in this article: Hearing Loss And the Ageing Brain.

And there’s more to hearing loss, than just the ability to here. There’s an increasing body of evidence that shows untreated hearing loss exacerbates depression, isolation and even dementia. So we think it is important to Get Your Hearing Tested If You Want To Avoid Premature Dementia.