How does hearing loss work?
Aaron H asked:
It’s an odd question, but what I mean is:
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It’s an odd question, but what I mean is:
Is it a gradual loss of being able to hear certain frequencies, causing the clicks in speech etc. to become less obvious. Until one day you can hear hardly any frequencies so you’re basically deaf.
Or is it a gradual loss of sound as a whole just getting quieter? So you can hear all frequencies, but everything’s quieter. . .until you cannot hear anything at all?
July 24th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Hearing loss is complex and is different from person to person. Our auditory system is similar to a piano - we have nerves that respond to each and every frequency. The symptoms that result from hearing loss will depend on the type of hearing loss you have. Typically with age, we begin to lose our hearing in the high pitches - speech may sound muffled or you may have difficult hearing the birds chirp or the leaves blow. Over time as the loss progresses, it may affect the mid pitches will affect your ability to hear speech even further.
For some they may experience loss equally over all the pitches - it just depends on the cause and type of hearing loss.
Hearing loss typically does come on gradual so persons often do not know they have hearing loss until it worsens or until they have their hearing tested. Just as we compensate with our vision, we compensate with our hearing. Some persons experience sudden hearing loss; however this is more rare:
To learn more about hearing loss, causes, symptoms, how we hear, etc I would visit the following site - a wonderful consumer online resource for info on hearing loss: