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Re: Hearing aids

Author: sdr
Date: 2007-05-04 14:17

Re: "Cocktail party syndrome" -- difficulty discriminating voices in noise.

Your ears collect the sound, but all the analysis is done by the brain. Here's the vision analogy: If you are looking for your friend and he's the only one in the room, he's easy to spot. If you are looking for your friend at the basketball game and he's sitting in the bleachers with 18,000 other people, he's hard to spot. Finding him is a pattern recognition task -- separating one specific face from a sea of similar ones. Hearing your friend's voice in a noisy restaurant is the exact same task --- discriminating his voice from a sea of similar ones, with overlapping frequency and loudness. This is a challenging task when the ear is normal. It is even more difficult if the ear does not collect all the sounds (try the vision task with dark glasses on). I am sure you have had the experience of reading something, getting all the way to the bottom of the page and realizing you don't know anything you just read. You are not going blind -- you just didn't capture the info as your eyes ran over the page. This is a central processing issue in the brain, probably due to lack of attention, fatigue, stress, etc. We do the same thing with hearing. In fact, that is the difference between hearing and listening.

-sdr

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