Improving hearing is just like any
other skill — it takes practice.
A loud restaurant or party can make
conversation difficult for anyone, but for the elderly, these settings can make
hearing what others have to say nearly impossible. Your hearing declines with age, but the latest
research focuses on another part of the problem — the slower processing
speed of aging brains, which have to work harder to translate sound into
intelligible language.
A new study of auditory
training, called Posit Science’s “Brain Fitness,” suggests that most people who
are hard of hearing can develop skills that actually improve their hearing. In a report published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, scientists showed that people who trained
using the program for 40 hours over 8 weeks were able to pick out 41% more
words from background noise compared to those who watched educational DVD’s and
were quizzed on their contents after the same amount of time.
Both those who received the training
and those who watched the DVDs were tested on short term memory, brain
processing speed and the ability to hear speech in noisy settings. All of the participants showed improvement in
these three areas, but for the first time, the scientists also documented that
the sharper hearing was accompanied by earlier signaling in the brainstem. EEG
electrodes on the head picked up this activity, which was related to how
quickly the brain was distinguishing between sounds, such as language vs.
background chatter.
The findings from the research prove
that training not only improved the ability to decipher speech in noisy
situations, it also sped up the brain’s ability to respond to it — bringing it
to more ‘youthful’ levels. Researchers
are now
investigating how long the benefits of the training last and whether the
program will be as effective in people with minor to severe age-related hearing
loss or dementia.
Read
more about the study.
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