A recent post mentioned in passing that noise harms hearing.  Audiologists know this and have know it for so long that we almost take it for granted.  Here at TAI, we thought about that and corrected the oversight with a post that defined and explained “noise induced hearing loss” (NIHL).

Now comes a post where we touch on the variety of ingenious ways in which young people seek to give themselves NIHL.  Why do we say young?  No, we’re not being ageist, just realistic:  the “weaponization” of noise levels and associated activities attract risk-seeking young people. But, like all risky behaviors, behaviors associated with loud noise aren’t conducive to longevity of hearing hair cells or bodies in general, as confirmed in the hair (cell) raising video at the end of this post.

Our post  was half-written when we stumbled across a phenomenal article on recreational noise exposure that appeared in yesterday’s NYTimes.  At 4 well-written pages, it covers a lot of ground.  The authors did all the digging for us and provided perfect quotes, so we did a rewrite.  Much of what follows comes from the NYTimes article, which we hope you’ll take time out to read in its entirety.

As a rule, it seems that Young People like Noise, regardless of what it does to their ears and bodies.  Here are examples in support of that rule:

Restaurants and Bars

Apparently, young people don’t prefer night clubs these days.  Instead, they flock to restaurants with bars that act like night clubs– full of loud people drinking and music blaring.  Sound level measurements in such environments in Manhattan averaged in the upper 90 dB range for hours on end. Amazingly, such deafening levels are  sometimes achieved  without the aid of loud music: one hard surface environment packed with people averaged  96 dB just by packing in  tons of people literally screaming at each other. Employees are the collateral damage in these environments.  They experience tinnitus, migraine headaches, raw throats (from yelling at customers), and stress. They hide in closets to escape noise, take seizure medications, and refuse to give their names for fear of being fired from these “desirable” jobs.

Shopping

When it comes to Noise, Abercrombie and Fitch is cutting edge.  The stores pipe in blaring music , lending a Club atmosphere to the shopping experience. Young shoppers find this appealing, their parents do not.  Kids venture in alone with their parents’ credit cards.  Noise goes up, sales go up.

Exercise

Spinning maxes out the Noise.  Loud music – supposedly to simulate a Club atmosphere and make you forget you’re exercising—exceeds 100 dB throughout the some classes.  Asking instructors to turn it down may not be effective since the loud music is apparently part of the experience.  To some extent, this must be the case with exercise classes in general.  We’ve heard complaints from older patients about the loud music  in exercise groups for years.

Fireworks

This video says it all, including a few curse words at the end that may prompt some of you to protect your ears, so to speak.  Crisis brings out the best and worst in people, especially when they bring on the crises themselves.  Though vulgar, we do think the most rationale “plan” manifest in the video is the reaction of the guy at the end, spoken with some urgency:

“Grab the watermelon, this s[...]‘s goin’ down.”

Better yet: “Cover your ears and run like h[..].”

Our title refers to Darwin and survival of the fittest.  At TAI, we work hard to impress upon people how important it is to protect ears.  Most of our patients have lived successful lives and come to us with hearing loss “earned” over time, often including a history of noise exposure.  Few of them come to us with stories such as shown in the video, suggesting that young people of the type shown in the video don’t survive long enough to become our patients.

But, we’re betting on the Watermelon Guy, to whom we are awarding the very first TAI Audio Darwin Award.  We’re looking forward to helping him in the future.

None of the above explains WHY these things happen.  Stay tuned for another post for data on that.

Submitted for your reading and viewing pleasure by

Your Tucson Audiologists,

Holly Hosford-Dunn PhD

and

Sharon K Hopkins MA

We’re going to do a few posts on scientific studies that catch our interest, not because they necessarily have clinical application, but because they give insight into how hearing works and why hearing is important not only to we humans but to other species as well.  Today’s post looks at tiny organisms less than a millimeter in size.  Who knew they had ears?!

Coral larvae are no bigger than fleas but recent research proves that they “hear” sound and use directional hearing in a sophisticated manner to increase their survival odds.  The proof was gathered by observing larvae floating aimless around in water tanks.  Aimless drifting behavior turned intentional, or at least non-random, when speakers in the tanks started playing reef sounds and the larvae headed for the speakers.

This is big news for marine biologists AND hearing scientists.  First, it helps explain a crucial coral survival:  every month when the full moon comes out, coral larvae use sound navigate to select and settle into the prime real estate of reefs.  Second, it establishes the hitherto unknown fact that these tiny creatures have “ear(s)” of some sort.  The form and function of these new ears remains a mystery, but scientists speculate that surface hair cells are disturbed by sound waves traveling through water.  This would be akin to we humans wearing our inner ears–with their 40,000 hair cells– out on our arms or finger tips.

It’s a fragile survival system and a fragile ear.  It wouldn’t take much noise to confuse the larvae and keep them from landing on a reef.  The scientists hypothesize this may be happening:  ”small boats, shipping, drilling, pile driving and seismic testing” are masking the reef sounds so that the larvae can’t find a safe home, thus providing an explanation for coral’s “well-charted decline in recent decades.”

ref:  Coral Larvae Move toward Reef Sounds

Submitted for your reading pleasure,

Holly Hosford-Dunn PhD FAAA

and

Sharon K Hopkins MA FAAA

photo courtesy of Darwinism in Ruins

Have you encountered people who speak loud and long, dominating conversations by turning a dialog into a monolog?  Maybe the loud person was in another group, but so loud that s/he interfered with the conversation you were trying to have?  If you’ve had these experiences, you likely wondered why the person was talking so loudly and why they weren’t interested in what others had to say.  If so, you are not alone.  There is even a Q&A forum on the internet that wonder why people talk loudly (http://askville.amazon.com/people-talk-loud-soft/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=65314333). 

When confronted with people who are loud, you may have judged them to be rude, self-involved, or angry.  You probably did what you could to distance yourself.  You may not have considered that they were trying to cope with unacknowledged hearing loss, but that is quite likely.

People who have difficulty hearing conversation because of hearing loss have options:  1)  fake it by nodding and laughing when it seems appropriate, 2)  “talk over” others to convince themselves they are engaged in conversation, 3)  retreat from and limit their social interaction, or 4) seek means of correcting their hearing. 

As Audiologists, we get to meet people of all four types in our practice:

1.  Those who adopt the “nod and chuckle” approach end up in our office after they laugh in the wrong place or nod yes when they should have nodded “no” –  embarrassing themselves into acknowledging their hearing problem.  
2. Those who talk over others begin to notice that they have fewer and fewer people in their conversational circles as people move away from them.  Even if their social isolation is not complete, they are likely to start missing the “sparkle” that comes with interactive dialog.  They come to our office when they ackowledge that their hearing problem is causing them to miss out on communication.
3. Those who retreat from social interaction lose their connection to life and frequently experience depression. With help from friends and loved ones, they can identify the issue and seek help for their hearing problem, hopefully before depression and withdrawal make them miserable.
4. Those who recognize that they have a hearing problem can almost always be helped with some type of amplification.  Once they are using hearing aids optimally — which takes some learning and effort — they are ready to start participating on an equal basis in conversation — allowing dialog instead of monolog, retreat, or head nodding.

And now for the fun part of this post!  It turns out that dominating conversation is a problem for lots of people, even those without hearing loss.  It’s such a big problem that a German company called Unperfecthaus (pretty easy to translate that!) has come up with an iphone app that keeps conversational score.  The app is called “talk-o-meter.”  As the talk-o-meter folks put it, “Some people just talk too much.”  What to do?  Use the talk-o-meter to show them the error of their ways.  Here’s a description of how it works, from the Unperfecthaus people themselves: 

At intervals of 1, 2 or 5 minutes you see different lengths of red and blue bars that show what percentage of time each speaker was talking. Nobody has to be unpleasantly exhorted – from time to time everyone will have a cursory glance at the Talk-o-Meter and adapt if he is talking too much. Gentle biofeedback works.

Here’s the link where we found the talk-o-meter.  That link will take you to the Unperfecthaus site, if you want other solution-apps for your phone:  http://laughingsquid.com/talk-o-meter-iphone-app-shows-who-is-dominating-a-conversation/

Holly Hosford-Dunn PhD FAAA