Experimenting on My Hearing Loss(0x90.psaux.io) |
Experimenting on My Hearing Loss(0x90.psaux.io) |
This leads to people constantly telling me to get my "hearing checked", when it's not the ability to hear tones that's the problem.
Rather irritating explaining this to people.
Want to accurately test it? Put me in the lobby of your hearing center with a wall phone and try to have a conversation with me, it would be immediately apparent. Of course they won't do that (too many uncontrolled variables) but they could at least try to make the test more lifelike.
It's very frustrating because I feel like if I could get a formal diagnosis I could ask for accommodations at work like not using the telephone for support calls (email and instant message instead).
It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening).
I feel like if I could say up front, "I have a diagnosed condition that affects my hearing," I could avoid a lot of problems and confusion. Unfortunately I can't seem to get a diagnosis.
> It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening).
I feel for you. This reminded me of my recent discovery. You've probably seen this[0] image test circulating on social media the other day. Few days ago, when working with my wife through some issues between us, I showed this to her. To my utter disbelief, she scored 6. I score 2. 3 on a good day. Suddenly, both of us realized why we're getting annoyed with each other whenever talking about things like remodelling the kitchen, rearranging the living room, or planning the layout of a new flat. As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head. And she now understands that I really do need to measure everything and drop it into CAD software before I'm ready to talk.
All because of a simple test that I only remembered because I've been obsessed with my aphantasia for over a year now. This makes me wonder: how many of such undiagnosed differences of perception are there between couples, that make living together difficult, because neither side can understand the other truly perceives the world differently?
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[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...
I am not an expert by experience but what you have described sounds like a possible Auditory Processing Disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder). Experts in this disorder are very limited but there are strategies available for managing APD. However there is rarely a silver bullet for hearing disorders.
Hearing loss isn't only about volume and "hearing". It's also about understanding. When you get a hearing test, they aren't just testing frequencies. They'll also ask you to repeat back words that are said to you. There IS treatment for this, and you may actually benefit from a hearing aid or some other device that would help.
Your insurance should cover a hearing test! Just get it! It's pretty painless and kind of fun. Worst case scenario? They tell you your hearing is fine and you're back where you started.
Good luck!
That's a high entry price for something so similar in concept to the brain-training snake-oil schemes that used to be sold in the back of magazines
What you have is a hearing discrimination loss. It's often caused by diminished hearing of higher frequencies. Hearing aids can help or if the loss of higher frequencies is total, then frequency-transposition hearing aids may be needed. Learning to lip read can also help a lot too.
Other people without hearing discrimination loss have probably experienced what it's like if they've ever listened to a cheap TV with crummy internal speakers and had to turn on subtitles. Very high frequencies on cheap speakers are often diminished or distorted. That makes it much more difficult to discriminate spoken words even though you can hear them fine.
If you haven't done so already, go get your hearing tested by a quality audiologist (there is such a thing as a bad audiologist). It can help identify exactly what's going on and give you a good baseline to compare against tests in the future (these things often get worse with age).
If I give my brain that time to catch up, it,s able to put context and sound together into meaning most of the time.
I have not confirmed this speculation with an audiologist, so I would love comments on this from someone who works on hearing-aid software.
Now, I have more severe problems, because of all this teleconferencing going on. Not a single smartphone I know supports what you are doing on the PC. Are there any?
And no one's going to actually figure out treatment, because there's no money in it.
I even know the exact frequency of the ringing - it's 15,734 Hz, from the flyback transformers of old CRT monitors. It's kind of weird to know that but have multiple audiologists be unable to check.
It's deeply disappointing.
I have some mild tinnitus and listen to hours of audiobooks a day. I could see this being a great add-on to apps like Audible or Bound.
I saw a documentary about the boston bombers, and a lot of the survivors lost their legs or had their legs maimed. One of the survivors had a leg that was basically an attempted save and she elected to amputate it,she said that what she would miss the most was feeling her toes in the sand. Now even the though the thought of that had never crossed my mind before, I could immediately correlate that feeling with my own sense of loss wrt. my vision.
The older I get the more dismayed i get with the medical community / industry. There's so much pain in the world, and it seems like the people most competent with the issues, are more occupied by nonsense. In almost all other professional trades, people willingly give their time and energy to solve problems. But when it comes to the most important machine as in - ourselves it's all for the money.
In addition to my normal hearing loss, I sometimes have trouble with this in one ear. Fortunately it has always gone away, so far.
I suspect that some amount of this is your brain adapting to changes in hearing. Perhaps there is some way to study how people adjust to wearing new hearing aids?
I've been using technology to adjust for this since I was a kid in the 1980's and 90's: Turn the treble up, the bass down on every radio I own.
I recently installed VoiceMeter Banana on my PC and I can use it to do the same thing. It really can help!
This is a very cool project, I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them?
I have a basic model provided free by the (UK) NHS. It is tuned to my audiogram by my NHS audiologist.
More sophisticated models do a lot of tailoring, both to the person and to the environment. By way of example:
https://wdh02.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-...
The trick is figuring out what's necessary. The first half of the post made me nervous, because it simply applied a gain of threshold - basedB. As he discovered, that's too loud.
What you want is a compressor. The second half of the post boosts the signal just above the threshold, but it's a little more complex than that. I haven't really studied this, but for starters you want to take into account things like the Fletcher-Munson curves.
I am intrigued by these types of projects. As my hearing gets worse, I'd like to be able to listen to music and watch movies with nice headphones, but with the assistance that comes from hearing aids.
Yes, yes, definitely do. I put my exam off for years until the effect of hearing loss began to affect my work. I literally couldn't hear questions asked by quietly spoken people or in conference rooms with noisy aircon. Also, because my mother-in-law refused to wear them (she was severely deaf) and I knew how much this annoyed my wife.
I wish I had gone several years earlier! It is just great to be able to follow normal conversations, listen to birdsong, and even hear the rattles in the car. I wear mine religiously, even when on my own on the house. Just to hear the little sounds that the world makes as you interact with it.
Very occasionally I notice people looking at my ears when they have seen the aids for the first time, but this is frankly nothing compared with the embarrassment that can be caused if you ignore someone because you haven't heard them, or attempt to guess what they have said and get it wrong.
I'm used/adapted to go without them, so basically forcing myself to "re-adjust" my brain by wearing them all the time would make my hearing actually far worse than it feels. It's really weird, each doctor who examined my hearing was amazed how well I actually hear without any aids with my condition. So, I was good with wearing aids only when I really needed them, but with teleconferencing it doesn't work anymore and would be worse if I was used to wearing aids.
Maybe you need to lower the gain? That will make it easier to wear them full-time. Now my brain have adjusted to the new sound and tbh I don't think I can live without hearing aids now.
I have Oticon Ruby with open domes.
I've thought about looking at if there are frequency shifting hearing aids or even just earpieces to shift some of those higher frequencies into my hearing range of the right ear.
I haven't spent too much digging deeper into it - since I'm completely functional at normal levels, however whispering by anyone and low volume female voices on my right side are completely lost. I typically do that "speak to my good ear" contortion. Or just sit in the corner of the table or sit to the right in other conversations.
My ears are fine, and I still sometimes dont understand what people are talking about in some situations.
How many engineers work in, say, making education available for the poor vs "improving engagement" (generating addiction) for ad-based entertainment businesses?
Resources aren't usually allocated the way one would suppose is the best for society as a whole; but I don't see how that's in any way exclusive to medicine.
I thought i did my due diligence, but i only read medical papers, and in medical papers they standardize results. So if you see 3 sharp A's thats 20/20, even though theres only one A on the board. And this is not to mention halos, starburst(just google them). From my perspective they lie about the risk and it's an filthy industry built on this lie.
I've used glasses and contact lenses and i have never had so many issues with my eyes as after i had laser treatment on my eyes. The biggest one was a migraine that would go away after 10 minutes if i closed one eye but i had it for 1 1 /2 year. I can honestly tell you that that shit brok me. Enduring pain every day will fuck you up.
So i had different results on both my eyes, not particular good on either i'd say but according to the optometrist i had great vision. Eventually the pain subsided, but it's not gone and comes back quite often (multiple times each day) Then theres the discrepancy in vision quality. One thing is not seeing sharp - how about text appearing grey in one eye and not the other. I have double vision albeit only under certain circumstances(light). I have variable sharpness. I have have hazy vision. I have a 2k USD OLED that i dont use, because white letters on black background is like a river of white fog beneathe the text. It's like a light shadow thats below bright stuff. I also have this in real life, i see two white powercables, one like a opaque version of the other.
My night vision is a tragedy, the red break lights on a car will appear as large as a house with enough distance(it gets worse the further away i am from the source). Frontlights will blind me, led lights from scooters are offensive.
So all in all it bad all around. Nothing good to say about it at all.
Turns out theres these things called Higher order aberrations which basically is unevenness in the lens after treatment, which makes light bend. And get this, they don't diagnose for this because they don't have any tools or treatment for it basically.
Found this site after the fact ; https://lasikcomplications.com/
Edit: That's not to say this isn't a cool project, it is VERY cool.
Testing showed I had some hearing loss - but not a lot. I ended up getting more tests. They played a series of words into my "good" ear and I had to repeat them: "duck"... "duck". "concrete" .... "concrete"... it was pretty funny.
Then they did the same thing in my other ear: "schmwaaa" ... "Smchmwaa?"... "Grunnnngch"... "wtf?!". Turned out I had an accoustic neuroma - a tumor on the auditory nerve. Got it cut out with some neurosurgery, but now am 100% deaf in one ear with shitty tinnitus.
Hearing loss is pretty common so I don't want to scare-monger - but, OP - follow up on the tests!
Once there's an audiogram captured into the Health app, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Headphone Accomodations > Transparency Mode.
Some of these are not immediately obvious as links. He can then modify the amplification and 'brightness' of the sound.
I'd urge you have him get real hearing aids though. They are pricey, but so much better long term. There are newer ones that can connect to IOS devices and stream sound.
I started wearing hearing aides in my mid 50s and had no issues, and the positive effect on my hearing was immediately obvious (night and day, in fact). However, I think if you were much older and losing manual dexterity and visual acuity there might be problems - e.g. they can be quite fiddly to put in and clean on a daily basis. Cleaning the tube that goes in your ear is like threading a large needle with a fat wire. Steady fingers and corrected eyesight helps.
The brain is amazing - I realized how much I rely on visual cues for hearing when I very faintly "heard" a GIF of someone mouthing the words f* you!
Another thing is the ambiguity that comes with not really hearing high pitched sounds - many words with consonants become very hard to distinguish. "Cat - hat - sat" are similar visually and if you only hear "at - at - at", your brain is still able to tell which one is the correct by context. This is terrible when learning a new language though.
It sounds like we have an inverted situation to yours, where I was lucky to have a similar capability for visualization and spatial sense as your wife. This frustrated my wife and I to no end as she'd be driving the car and I'd say "you know you're basically riding the shoulder" and she would legitimately not realize the car was not centered. (To be clear, not from lack of attention, but from over-judging the distance from the left lane.) We had similar snips to your point about "can't you just visualize it in your head" (As it turns out, no, but I had trouble wrapping my head around that at first.)
For almost a decade this just ended up in recurring irritation and arguments whenever we drove together, until, and kinda to the point of the GP, we realized I _cannot differentiate dark objects on black backgrounds_, despite otherwise excellent visual acuity and response times. This may sound orthogonal to the car story, but to your point, after many inverses where she'd tease me about "well maybe you can't find your shirt just like I can't find the center of the road" we started to ask "wait maybe we both actually just really suck at this one class of task."
It's not quite as stark as the "can't visualize 3d fields" to be clear, but it was still a moment of "wait, we've just been living in completely different perceptual universes for a long long time now." (E.g. we'd be in a dark room, I'd walk into a wall or be unable to find anything, she would think I was making a bad joke or being obtuse.)
I tend to believe that this runs so so so much deeper than we know, and have made it the subject of some sci fi shorts that I've been hacking on. (That our mental models, ways of reasoning about the world, perceptions of reality, are truly distinct, the whole "what if what you think is green is blue to me" conundrum; and what happens when rational decisions coincide in pathological ways given varying, but individually rational and internally, although not externally consistent, perceptions)
Here I would have told you that I can visualize everything in my head... until I took the test – definite 1. I can visualize everything in some loose sense, but it is encoded differently. Like, to use a poor analogy, a computer can represent an image as binary digits. I can understand 6 in my mind. Perhaps I took the test too literally?
With my score of 2, I also "encode differently". I can sort-of work with imaginary visual data in my head, but it feels like - excuse the bad analogy - like looking into a debugger hooked up to a program that tries to render something. I am aware of an imaginary object, I can manipulate it symbolically. I can stack transformations in my head, like "it's rotated horizontally", "and also on the other axis", and "it's red", but most of my manipulations happen at this symbolic layer. The rendering pipeline goes nowhere; if I focus, I can sometimes force an unclear image to appear briefly.
I'm not sure I can completely relate to your experience with needing CAD, other than I've noticed that sometimes the real world is flipped to my mental model, which can lead to funny results when my actions are backwards. I can usually 'visualize' things like that, at least in some abstract sense.
Well, that is, except specifically when it comes to my bother and father. They can somehow explain things to each other and know exactly what they are talking about with ease, as if they have some kind of telepathic link. They can say the exact same thing to me and I'll have absolutely no clue as to what they are talking about until they draw a picture. Now you have me curious to know if they are able to score 6.