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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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/
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-...
Edit: That's not to say this isn't a cool project, it is VERY cool.
