Your brain is the true hero in making sense of sound

You might be surprised how big a role your brain has in hearing. Because of this, hearing loss affects not only how you hear, but can also affect your brain and general wellbeing.

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    Outer ear

    The external ear collects sounds and directs them into the auditory canal, towards the eardrum in the middle ear.

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    Middle ear

    Sound vibrates the eardrum, which is connected to three small bones: the malleus, incus, and stapes. Together, these are called the ossicles. They amplify and transmit the vibrations to the inner ear.

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    Inner ear

    All sounds from the environment reach the snail-like cochlea, which transforms sounds into electrical signals.

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    Audiatory nerve

    The electrical signal (neural code) travels from the cochlea to the brain via the auditory nerve, reaching a part of the brain called the auditory cortex.

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    Brain

    The brain naturally makes sense of a stream of raw sound information, constantly providing a 360° overview of the sounds around you and helping you to focus on what matters most.

How our hearing works

Our sense of hearing is made possible by the auditory system. Here you can explore how sounds are processed along the pathway from ear to brain.





Your brain is always receiving sound

Your brain receives a constant stream of sound from the ears - throughout the day and night. This is made up of all the sounds in your environment.

The brain needs to orient to this continuous sound stream. It analyses and organises the stream into different sound objects based on location, pitch and loudness.1, 2

The brain is now ready to choose which of these sound objects to focus on and listen to.

How hearing works in your brain

1. Your brain will ORIENT to the incoming sound and will continuously create a sound picture from the ever-changing world of sound around you.

2. Once your brain understands the sound scene around you, you can choose which sound to FOCUS on - and when to switch to another sound.

When we have the full sound picture, it is easier to choose which sound is most important to us to hear. Your brain can then use the sound information to activate countless other brain activities such as:
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  • Recognising and comprehending speech using your working memory
  • Triggering an emotion based on what you hear, such as happiness or fear
  • Formulating a response to a question
  • Jumping out of the way of danger
  • Remembering important information like someone’s name in your long-term memory
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With a full sound picture, the brain can reduce interfering sounds.

Hearing better means living better

Learn how to take charge of hearing loss so you can live the life you want.

Brain-friendly hearing aids

Good hearing can help your brain stay fit throughout your life. This means that hearing health is brain health, which is the reason Oticon develops BrainHearing™ technology for hearing aids.

Test your hearing online

Take our free online hearing test. You’ll get a good indication of your hearing abilities in just a few minutes.

Reference

  1. O’Sullivan et al. (2019). Hierarchical Encoding of Attended Auditory Objects in Multi-talker Speech Perception.
  2. Puvvada & Simon (2017). Cortical representations of speech in a multitalker auditory scene.