Noisy environments are the most challenging situations for understanding speech. If you have a hearing loss, your brain has to work harder to avoid noise interfering with your conversations. With personalised hearing help, your brain can hear as much as possible with the least amount of effort and strain.
Your ears are always ‘on’ – even when you’re asleep. This means your brain receives a continuous stream of information about the sounds all around you. Your brain recognises information such as what sounds you are hearing, where they are coming from, and what they mean. Based on such information, it makes sense of your entire environment.
In a noisy environment such as a café or a busy street, it is more difficult for your brain to separate the sounds and prioritise what to pay attention to. Making sense of the incoming sound information requires more effort, as though you are trying to complete a puzzle with pieces that you can't see clearly.
For the best overall hearing experience including in noisy places, hearing aids must be precisely fitted to each person’s particular hearing. This ensures they can precisely amplify just the sounds that person needs and make them available – not simply make everything louder.
However, hearing aids shouldn’t entirely remove background noise. The brain needs access to all of the sounds around you in order to work naturally. Hearing aids should ensure the sounds you want to hear are available and the sounds you don't want to hear – such as disturbing background noise – are reduced. This supports the way your brain naturally makes sense of sound and makes it easier for your brain to understand speech in noisy situations.5
Identifying speech sounds allows you to tell the difference between words like sit and fit. The letters f, s, and the ‘sh’ sound are especially difficult. All speech sounds become much harder to discriminate between in noisy places.
This is why it’s important to ask your hearing care professional for a test that determines how well you hear in noise.
Higher levels of sound increase your listening stress – making your heart rate go up1 – and increasing the effort you must make to communicate.
If you have any hearing problems, background noise is especially challenging. Your brain receives less sound information, and it’s of poorer quality – like a low-resolution video.At the same time, your ability to switch your attention between different sounds becomes slower and less efficient. Your brain’s ability to control noise is reduced, because your brain can less easily ‘tune out’ unwanted sounds. This can increase your listening stress and start a negative chain of reactions where understanding speech becomes harder,2 listening effort increases,3 and memory recall decreases.4
We have introduced a new test for diagnosing your unique hearing-in-noise abilities. Our test enables your hearing care professional to fit hearing aids that give you just the help you need to maximise your hearing in noise ability.
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References
Christensen et al. (2021). The everyday acoustic environment and its association with human heart rate: evidence from real-world data logging with hearing aids and wearables.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Kramer, S. E., Eckert, M. A., Edwards, B., Hornsby, B. W., Humes, L. E., ... & Naylor, G. (2016). Hearing impairment and cognitive energy: The framework for understanding effortful listening (FUEL). Ear and Hearing, 37, 5S-27S. 2.
(Rönnberg, J., Lunner, T., Zekveld, A., Sörqvist, P., Danielsson, H., Lyxell, B., ... & Rudner, M. (2013). The Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model: theoretical, empirical, and clinical advances. Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 7, 31.)
Santurette, et al. 2020. Oticon More clinical evidence. Oticon Whitepaper.
O'Sullivan, A. E., Lim, C. Y., & Lalor, E. C. (2019). Look at me when I'm talking to you: Selective attention at a multisensory cocktail party can be decoded using stimulus reconstruction and alpha power modulations. European Journal of Neuroscience, 50(8), 3282-3295.