Reply With QuoteNice. Frame your certificate and stick it above the mantelpiece.Originally Posted by Harry Smith
As I've gotten older my wife and daughter have found great enjoyment accusing me of being deaf at every opportunity. I have been around noisy things most of my life including all the boys toys (guns bikes airplanes etc) plus a number of years clubbing (not seals) so I confess to a bit of tinnitus.
I do feel it's a bit of a set-up as they prefer to talk (mutter) to me facing away and at least in another room with the telly on.
So last week whilst enjoying the Specsavers free eyetest experience I noticed they do free Hear tests. They did me on the spot and I passed with perfect result.
Pair of little twatties will have to find another way to irritate me now. Shouldn't be too hard as I enter the Victor Meldrew years I suppose.
Nice. Frame your certificate and stick it above the mantelpiece.
As we get older our hearing becomes more selective, its amazing what we can filter out :-)
For years my step mum would bang on about how dad's hearing was getting worse.
Oddly, me and my brother have never had a problem communicating with him at all so I suspect some selective hearing is at play.
My Mum had her hearing tested after years of us telling her that shes going deaf ,
and she passed as well .
She still can't hear a thing !!
Hidden hearing loss?
Strange I have the opposite. One side is 25% of normal function and the other 50%. Never been accused of being deaf and in general find cinemas/modern music listening levels way too high to be comfortable. I don't understand it! (Can't make out a word in a noisy pub though, the background noise kills all the detail but it's surprising how well you get by with casual lip-reading.)
I’m 60, I’ve listened to loud music over the years and spent a couple of years using power tools without ear defenders. My wife claims I’m getting a bit hard of hearing but I don’t agree, I simply enjoy TV and music louder than she likes it. She has an annoying habit of talking to me whilst in another room and complaining when I don’t catch what she’s said, nowadays I don’t even attempt to listen, if it’s important she’ll tell me again! I don’t have a problem listening to anyone else when they speak, but I have to confess to not always listening when she’s wittering on.
As I understand it, we lose the ability to hear higher frequencies as we age, that’s why it becomes harder to listen to speech against background noise.
I’m sceptical about Specsavers etc encouraging us to have hearing tests, they’re obviously keen to sell elaborate hearing aids at significant prices.
My other half thinks I'm deaf.
ook
Alternatively pretend to be deaf.
You may need to change your will several times
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
What?!
Fas est ab hoste doceri
Just listened to a couple if vinyl albums tonight, at ‘sensible’ volume to fully experience the music........nowt wrong with my ears!
Forgotten how good the Fleetwood Mac ‘Rumours’ album sounded!
One of the best albums ever made.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
It's a belter. Agreed. Didn't appreciate it back in the day.
Funnily enough I had the exact same situation except I failed the hearing test miserably
I will never hear the last of it (or any of it I suppose)
This type of “hidden hearing loss” paradoxically presents itself as essentially normal hearing in the clinic, where audiograms—the gold-standard for measuring hearing thresholds—typically take place in a quiet room.
The reason some forms of hearing loss may go unrecognized in the clinic is that hearing involves a complex partnership between the ear and the brain. It turns out that the central auditory system can compensate for significant damage to the inner ear by turning up its volume control, partially overcoming the deficiency, explains Richard Salvi, professor of communicative disorders and sciences at the University at Buffalo, director of the Center for Hearing and Deafness, and the study’s lead author.
“You can have tremendous damage to inner hair cells in the ear that transmit information to the brain and still have a normal audiogram,” says Salvi. “But people with this type of damage have difficulty hearing in certain situations, like hearing speech in a noisy room. Their thresholds appear normal. So they’re sent home.”
To understand why a hearing test isn’t identifying a hearing problem it’s necessary to follow the auditory pathway as sound-evoked neural signals travel from the ear to the brain.
About 95 percent of sound input to the brain comes from the ear’s inner hair cells.
“These inner hair cells are like spark plugs in an eight-cylinder engine,” says Salvi. “A car won’t run well if you remove half of those spark plugs, but people can still present with normal hearing thresholds if they’ve lost half or even three-quarters of their inner hair cells.”
Ear damage reduces the signal that goes to the brain. That results in trouble hearing, but that’s not what’s happening here, because the brain “has a central gain control, like a radio, the listener can turn up the volume control to better hear a distant station,” Salvi says.
Sound is converted to neural activity by the inner hair cells in the auditory part of the ear, called the cochlea.
Sound-evoked neural activity then travels from the cochlea to the auditory nerve and into the central auditory pathway of the brain. Halfway up the auditory pathway the information is relayed into a structure known as the inferior colliculus, before finally arriving at the auditory cortex in the brain, where interpretation of things like speech take place.
For people with inner hair cell loss, sound is less faithfully converted to neural activity in the cochlea. However, this weakened sound-evoked activity is progressively amplified as it travels along the central auditory pathway to the inferior colliculus and onward. By the time it reaches the auditory cortex, things are hyperactive because the brain has recognized a problem.
“Once the signal gets high enough to activate a few neurons it’s like your brain has a hearing aid that turns up the volume,” says Salvi.
It’s not clear how many people might have this type of hearing loss, but Salvi says it is a common complaint to have difficulty hearing in noisy environments as people get older. The perceptual consequences include apparently normal hearing for tests administered in quiet settings, but adding background noise often results in deficits in detecting and recognizing sounds
That’s why the way we’re measuring hearing in the clinic may not be adequate for subtle forms of hearing loss,” says one of the study’s coauthors, Benjamin Auerbach, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Hearing and Deafness.
In addition to informing how hearing tests are conducted, Auerbach suggests that this compensation might be causing or contributing to other auditory perceptual disorders such as tinnitus, often described as a ringing in the ears, or hyperacusis, a condition that causes moderate everyday sounds to be perceived as intolerably loud.
“If you have excessive gain in the central auditory system, it could result in the over-amplification of sound or even make silence sound like noise,” says Auerbach.
Severe Tinnitus since chemo and a noticeable drop in noise/sound levels since chemo. Doesn't bother me particularly but I doubt if I would get the same response if it was my eyesight as in " are you blind or something"
I’m partially deaf. 10% left on my left ear and 60% on my right one. It does help in the morning when the kids are noisy and I want to keep snoozing, just turn on my right side and I can barely hear a thing.
Most people don’t really notice as I’m a good lip reader.
Ah the similarities with you guys, had a hearing test because her indoors insisted, passed easily. But she has the trait of all women it seems, when she wants to talk, she leaves the room then says something, how the hell can I hear that.
That aside I find I can’t have a conversation in a noisy place anymore, lip read as much as I can, and yes laugh and chance a yes or really depending on where I think the conversation is heading.
It’s back round noise that does it, in a quiet area I seem to have no problem or even too loud it’s painful at times.
...yes its probably old age and a younger life in destructuively noisy environments (be it copious concerts, or loud machinery etc.) But if you can do it get an MRI of your head to rule out anything else.
I probably need an MRI of my head to see if anything in there.
Definite food for thought in some of these posts.
The tinnitus in my left ear is like a throbbing whine so presumably caused by blood flow. Occasionally my right is like a low level thrum akin to a music (drum and bass) beat in the distance, in fact the first time I experienced it I asked Her if she could hear music lol. The latter can keep me awake when it occurs but the former I can ignore.
I just ask people to call my name first, then start the proper conversation. Sadly I don't get enough improper conversations these days. Getting my attention generally works.
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