3 ms·
There are actually a good reasons not to do this. A very large part of your hearing is brain training...your brain learning how to interpret the new stimulus i
by FPGAhacker 5y ago
There are actually a good reasons not to do this. A very large part of your hearing is brain training...your brain learning how to interpret the new stimulus it is getting. You need to give your brain time to adapt to new stimulus before evaluating whether you are hearing better or not. If you are constantly fiddling with your hearing aids, you never get the benefit of training.
This may not apply if your hearing loss was sudden, but many people get hearing aids only after years of decline. Your brain adapts to what it has available and you learn to hear as best you can with the limited stimulus. When you finally get hearing aids, it feels like your ears have been unblocked.
When it comes to interpreting speech though, especially in noisy circumstances, you have to give it time. Your brain isn't used to using the extra stimulus to interpret speech. In fact, it may have gotten used to hearing loss filtering out background noise and you may initially find all the stimulus makes it harder to interpret speech because of all the background noise you now hear that you previously didn't.
If you don't have patience and start immediately futzing with volume all the time, you never give your brain a chance to adapt, and will be very dissatisfied.
- unkeptbarista 5y agoI've been wearing hearing aids for almost 8 years. The brain training process is real and I'm glad the audiologist explained it.
- phreeza 5y agoCouldn't this brain training effect be included in a progressive algorithm like the one suggested? Such that the brain is gradually "guided" to the best performance by ramping up the hearing aid?
- dmi 5y agoMy (Phonak) hearing aids had a multi-week ramp-up to full power, in order to give my brain time to slowly adjust. Dealing with things like the occlusion effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occlusion_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occlusion_effect) just takes time, and getting used to something being in your ear for a large number of hours per day.
- retrac 5y agoYes! Modern hearing aids do some fancy processing to shift frequencies into the more audible range of the patient. Many people do not have a simple "not enough volume" hearing loss. Personally, it's like someone went and messed with all the settings on the audio equalizer, and then added some muffling to make sharp sounds less distinct. When programmed properly, I find my hearing aids on their various speech modes to sound distinctly artificial and processed. I imagine it would be jarring to the uninitiated. Like a good speech codec or vocoder. It's unlike anything else. But having grown up with DSP hearing aids doing this all my life, I find speech coming through them very comprehensible, often shockingly so compared to my normal hearing -- even with other amplification like regular headphones. I do dislike my hearing aids for music, though, even on the normal or music settings.