Unfortunately, as detailed above, the ears work by a more opaque and more complicated neurological magic than this. Why would this present a problem? Isn’t that how the ears work, anyway?
These assistive devices operate on an individual basis, taking the sound that enters the ear and amplifying it. Until quite recently, this really was the case, and many people still wear this kind of hearing aid. The popular idea of a hearing aid is a simple sound amplifier. Thankfully, whatever the specific profile of your hearing loss, technological advances mean it’s more likely than ever before your hearing can be restored to a passable or even near-perfect level.
Perfectly understandably, this can sometimes lead to tiredness, frustration, and a feeling of exclusion. Without this, many hard-of-hearing people (even those with extremely mild hearing loss) have to concentrate hard to clearly hear a single speaker in a noisy room. As referenced above, it’s thought that the interplay between the two halves of the brain after receiving signals from both ears aids both hearing and comprehension. Hearing speech clearly is often particularly tricky for those with binaural hearing loss. Hearing loss, of course, can arrive suddenly or gradually.Įither way, binaural hearing loss can often result in a marked reduction in our ability to localize sounds, to hear everything that’s going on in our surroundings, and is often accompanied by tinnitus. Some people have one ‘bad’ ear and another ‘good’ one. Some people are quite severely hearing-impaired in both ears, others only mildly. The severity, onset, and specific effects of binaural hearing loss vary from person to person. Unfortunately, even mild hearing loss in both ears can have outsized negative effects, as the information the brain receives from the ears becomes hard to process garbled, confused or just not quite right. By contrast, monaural hearing loss affects just one.īinaural hearing has a wide range of benefits as detailed above, which we often don’t realize until it’s too late. What is Binaural Hearing Loss?īinaural hearing loss is a hearing loss that affects both ears. The precise benefits of this are unclear, but it appears that when we hear with both ears and both halves of the brain we find speech more intelligible and have access to more auditory information, allowing us to better fill in gaps in speech, tune in to specific sound sources and tune out background noise. Somewhere, far back in the past, enough of your ancestors used their keen binaural hearing to dodge predators that you’re here today to read this article.Įven in the present day, whether we’re on hunting trips, in noisy bars, at concerts, or doing vehicle repairs, we enjoy and rely on intelligibility and localization – the ability to hear a sound clearly and tell where it is coming from – without really even thinking about it.īinaural hearing also helps us communicate clearly - as sound entering each ear has been demonstrated to stimulate the opposite side of the brain. In an evolutionary context, the benefits of being able to hear a sound and immediately pinpoint its location are obvious. The ears transmit all this data to the brain, which uses some complicated processes honed over our lifetimes and humanity’s far longer evolutionary career to tell us as best as it can what a sound is and where it’s coming from.
We don’t just hear with our ears, but with our brains too. Equally usefully, the sound arriving at each ear can be of slightly different volumes due to what audiologists call ‘head shadow.’ For example, a sound off at a right angle to the head can reach your nearest ear 0.6 milliseconds before it reaches the ear on the other side. Particularly important is the fact that binaural hearing provides for 360-degree hearing in a way we often take for granted, allowing us to hear sounds clearly from every direction without turning our heads.Īs far as we know, our hearing pinpoints sound in a similar way to that in which GPS satellites pinpoint users, by using the relative time delay between received signals. The same way music nearly always sounds better in stereo rather than mono, hearing is far more useful when your two sound-receivers (ears!) are both in working order. Humans naturally possess binaural hearing. Simply, binaural hearing is the ability to hear clearly with both ears.
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