29 Mar Brain-Friendly Hearing Aids
Hearing stimulates thinking so make sure your Hearing Aids are Brain-Friendly
Your ears collect sound which then travels to your brain’s hearing center. Your brain must select which sounds to focus on and which sounds should be filtered out. From here, the brain links the sound to your memory and emotions to turn it into something that makes sense.
Good hearing helps your brain stay fit throughout your life – and helps avoid many other health problems. This means that hearing health is vital to overall brain health.
What happens if your brain doesn’t get enough sound?
With hearing loss, there isn’t enough sound information coming to your brain from your ears.
The lack of quality sound information makes it more difficult to understand what people are saying and what’s happening around you. You may start to notice:
- People keep mumbling,
- You miss the point in their stories,
- Or you can’t hear the TV,
- You feel tired or stressed from socializing,
- You get Confused about conversations, or
- It’s easier to just stay at home.
These hearing problems may seem small at first but build up over time are the brain gets out of practice and effectively ‘forgets’ what sounds mean. This makes it much harder for the brain to orient itself in your surroundings – which then makes it harder to focus on what’s important and forces you to work harder just to keep up. Listening starts to take a lot more effort & becomes tiring as the brain struggles to recognize sounds from distorted sound information while filling in the gaps by remembering and guessing. Devoting so much mental load just to hearing means there is less mental capacity left over for other things (like remembering, understanding, and quickly coming up with a response) so it becomes harder for all the different parts of your brain to make sense of everything else in your life.
It makes sense then that your brain should get access to all the sounds around you.
What can you do to keep your brain healthy?
Adelaide Hearing has a collection of new Bluetooth hearing aids from several leading manufacturers that have developed ‘Brain-Friendly’ hearing technology.
The best hearing aids now provide full and accurate access to the entire soundscape around you. This assists the brain’s ability to process and understand clear, distinct sounds from all directions. I write sound (and not speech) because new innovations in hearing technology have discovered that the brain processes sound better when it has access to all sounds.
In the past, even the best hearing aids focussed only on a narrow band of speech in front of you and worked hard to suppress background noise. Cutting out the sound around you limits the information coming to your brain. It can’t work the way it is supposed to and has to waste energy trying to fill the gaps by guessing. This is exhausting and leaves your brain with less capacity for vital cognitive functions like remembering, thinking and socializing.
A better approach is to keep the wearer’s soundscape open and accessible to them. That is why the best hearing aids in 2021 should give your brain access to all the meaningful sounds around you to help it naturally understand the sounds you hear.
By providing your brain with a full sense of the sounds around you, it will learn to recognize the soundscene and automatically choose what to focus on to make sense of sound.
Choose brain-friendly hearing aids with BrainHearing technology
Visit Adelaide Hearing to explore technology that supports your brain to work more working effectively by giving you access to the full soundscene. Oticon’s More hearing device has achieved outstanding results using this technology. It is one of our most popular and effective new hearing aids. The Oticon More delivers sound from the entire soundscene with detail and clarity that the brain can efficiently use.
Call us today on 8357 2290 to book your Oticon More hearing aid trial. Like always, our trials are free of charge so you can determine the great results for yourself.