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Building listening strategies is one of the most important things a person with hearing loss can do. Auditory training, also known as auditory training, is a structured program that teaches the brain to identify speech and other sounds that are not as clear as normal hearing. It also teaches you how to get the most out of what you hear. Your brain is taught to listen through auditory training.
This is particularly critical after receiving a new hearing aid. It’s a little like learning a new language to recognize the new sounds. And, like with learning a new language, practice and training are beneficial.
The Roots of Auditory Training
As with so many things we use every day, auditory training has its roots in the military. During World War II, auditory training was established for the first time. Many active-duty personnel acquired hearing loss back then, as they do now. Hearing aids were inadequate, and the military couldn’t afford to lose these troops. Thus procedures to supplement hearing aids were devised.
The emphasis was on both speech-reading and auditory training. Another goal was to keep the ability to communicate effectively. Patients were taught how to fill in the gaps with linguistic skills and context.
Auditory training was phased out after WWII as hearing aids improved, but it is now required for newborns and young children who are born with hearing loss.
Recent Research on Auditory Training
Many adults with hearing loss would benefit from auditory training as well.
Many studies have revealed that aging affects the brain so the way sound is encoded in the brain is distorted and disrupted. This is true even when the sound is provided in a quiet area, and the audiogram indicates normal hearing. When there is background noise, it becomes even more obvious.
This was the subject of a study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The University of Maryland’s Samira Anderson, Ph.D. (a 2014 Emerging Research Grants recipient) and colleagues compared the brains of persons aged 61 to 73 to those aged 18 to 27. They discovered that their brains become less capable of processing speech sounds when other noises are present as people age. Speech understanding in noisy contexts was significantly lower for older persons than for younger adults.
An audiogram and speech-in-noise tests revealed that both groups had normal hearing. So, what caused the gap in speech comprehension? Unfortunately, the answer may be found in the aging brain. The researchers analyzed the midbrain area, which processes basic sound in most vertebrates, and the cortex, which has parts dedicated to speech processing in humans, using two different types of brain scans, regardless of whether there was a secondary noise cortex of older persons processed speech more slowly.
You Can Train Your Brain to Hear Better
Our brains’ ability to adapt and alter through time is one of their most remarkable features. Neuroplasticity is a scientific word that explains the brain’s ability to form new neural connections. When you lose your hearing, neuroplasticity leads brain circuits that you don’t use to hear to be reassigned to other senses like vision or touch.
As such, the sooner you begin to use hearing aids to treat hearing loss, the sooner you provide your brain access to the sounds it has been missing. According to research, our brains have considerably more neuroplasticity when we are younger, which isn’t always a good thing for a younger population with a higher prevalence of hearing loss. That is why it is so important to train our brains for sound earlier rather than later.
Auditory training can make the difference between hearing well with hearing aids and not hearing well with hearing aids. Auditory training can help you acclimate to your hearing aids and ultimately “hear” better. It can aid in the recognition of difficult consonants and vowels. It can also train your brain to process information more quickly and offer you more listening “stamina.”
It is important to remember that auditory training is not in and of itself a treatment for hearing loss. It is important to have an accurate understanding of your hearing abilities. How to get started? Get a hearing test. Contact us today to set up an appointment.