Hearing health is brain health
A limited sound scene can turn a hearing problem into a brain problem. Studies show that inadequate treatment of hearing loss can have negative consequences for people’s brains and lives.
Hearing loss increases the effort of listening. Making sense of what is heard becomes harder, increasing listening stress and increasing mental load, leading to fatigue and a tendency to give up when listening becomes challenging. Moreover, people with hearing loss risk that other senses may take over.
How hearing loss affects the brain
Increased listening effort
With less sound information, it’s harder for the brain to recognise sounds. It has to fill in the gaps, which requires more listening effort.1
Increased listening stress
Difficulties with following speech can cause listening stress2, triggering a ‘fight or flight’ response that raises the heart rate3, and studies have even show that short periods of stress can have a negative impact on our cognitive abilities.4
Increased mental load
Having to guess what people are saying and what's happening increases the load on the brain and leaves less mental capacity for remembering and performing.5,6
Reorganised brain functionality
Without enough stimulation in the hearing centre, the visual centre and other senses start to compensate, which changes the organisation of the brain.7
Good neural code is crucial for making sense of sound
When sounds reach the inner ear, they’re converted into neural code inside the cochlea. This information is then transported by the auditory nerve into the hearing centre of the brain – the auditory cortex. Inside the auditory cortex, this neural code becomes meaningful sound objects that can then be further interpreted and analysed by the brain. Two subsystems in the auditory cortex handle these tasks: The Orient subsystem and the Focus subsystem.11,12
STEP 1: Orient
The orient subsystem creates an overview of the sound scene
The orient subsystem continuously scans all surrounding sounds – no matter their nature and direction – to create a full perspective of the sound scene.
The orient subsystem depends on good neural code to create an overview of the sound objects and begin separating sounds to determine what is going on in the surroundings. This provides the brain with the best conditions to decide what to focus on and listen to.
STEP 2: Focus
The focus subsystem helps us select which sounds to listen to
The focus subsystem navigates through the full perspective of the sound scene. It identifies the sound it wants to focus on, listen to, or switch attention to, while the irrelevant sounds are filtered out.
The two subsystems work together continuously and simultaneously
While the two subsystems are responsible for different functions, our hearing depends on how well they work together, because their interaction ensures our present focus is always the most important.11,12
The brain distracts itself on purpose by checking in on the rest of the environment four times every second. This allows our focus to switch if something important appears in the sound scene.
When the two subsystems work well together, the rest of the brain can work optimally, which makes it easier to recognise, store, and recall sounds, and respond to what is happening.
A supressed sound scene gives poor neural code
With its directionality, gain reduction, speech prioritisation and traditional compression, conventional hearing aid technology restricts people’s access to the full sound scene.
Not only does this cut people off from their surroundings. It also goes against the brain’s natural way of working, causing the ear to send poor neural code to the brain. Poor neural code makes it harder for the orient subsystem to work properly, which then negatively impacts the focus subsystem.
Consequently, conventional hearing care technology contributes to providing a less than optimal sound picture for the brain to hear and understand.
BrainHearing™ technology provides the full sound scene
Our goal is to provide the most natural hearing experience. We use the philosophy of BrainHearing to develop technology that provides the brain with access to the full sound environment – because the more sound information the brain has to work with, the better the brain can perform.
At the heart of Oticon BrainHearing™ technology are the three industry-leading MoreSound Technologies: MoreSound Amplifier™, MoreSound Intelligence™, and MoreSound Optimizer™.
Proven to bring life-changing benefits
Oticon’s hearing aids don’t just improve hearing abilities. They also benefit the brain and support better wellbeing of people with hearing loss.
We know this because we go above and beyond the competition in the way we conduct research to prove the life-changing benefits associated with using our technology, such as reducing listening effort, increasing memory recall, and reducing listening stress.
To prove the incredible benefits of our technology, we put it to the test in dynamic scenarios that recreate real-life listening environments, using innovative research methods such as EEG testing, pupillometry, VR technology, and pulse monitoring.
References
- Edwards (2016). A Model of Auditory-Cognitive Processing and Relevance to Clinical Applicability.
- Christensen et al. (2021). The everyday acoustic environment and its association with human heart rate: evidence from real-world data logging with hearing aids and wearables.
- Cooper & Dewe (2008). Stress: A brief history.
- Qin et al (2009). Acute psychological stress reduces working memory-related activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
- Pichora-Fuller et al. (2016). Hearing impairment and cognitive energy: The framework for understanding effortful listening (FUEL).
- Rönnberg et al. (2013). The Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model: theoretical, empirical, and clinical advances.
- Glick & Sharma (2020). Cortical Neuroplasticity and Cognitive Function in Early-Stage, Mild-Moderate Hearing Loss: Evidence of Neurocognitive Benefit From Hearing Aid Use.
- Huang et al. (2023). Loneliness and Social Network Characteristics Among Older Adults With Hearing Loss in the ACHIEVE Study.
- Lin et al. (2011). Hearing loss and incident dementia.
- Amieva et al. (2018). Death, depression, disability, and dementia associated with self-reported hearing problems: a 25-year study.
- O’Sullivan et al. (2019). Hierarchical Encoding of Attended Auditory Objects in Multi-talker Speech Perception.
- Puvvada & Simon (2017). Cortical representations of speech in a multitalker auditory scene.
- Brændgaard/Zapata-Rodriguez et al.(2024). 4D Sensor technology and Deep Neural Network 2.0 in Oticon Intent™. Technical review and evaluation. Oticon Whitepaper.