Better Hearing Tips

Dec

2021

Helpful Hearing Tips for the Holidays

Hear well for the holidays!

This blog post discusses several tips and strategies for hearing well during the holidays. The holiday season can be an excellent time for relaxing, spending time with family and friends, and great conversation. Promoting a better hearing environment can allow you to have a more enjoyable holiday season. Not hearing well during family and friend gatherings can cause anxiety, undue stress, and a reluctance to attend future gatherings and events.

Let’s discuss my top holiday hearing tips!

To start, seating arrangements play a vital role in better hearing. Circular seating arrangements allow guests to see one another better, increasing their ease of communication. Reading facial expressions and mouth movements can provide up to a 30% increase in understanding; why not take advantage of that boost! If it's available, use a circular seating arrangement.

If you wear hearing aids, make sure to have them cleaned and tuned-up by your audiologist before the holiday season. Always carry spare batteries with you, and make sure your hearing aids are charged! Having spare hearing aid filters and domes readily available is also an excellent idea. Hearing aids only work well when they maintained and taken care of.

Are you planning on entertaining guests with board games? Play board games and party games that encourage turn taking. A poor communication setting is made when everyone is yelling answers and directions for a game all at the same time. Turn taking games are much more listening friendly. Also, games that rely on whispering and music are not good choices for individuals that have a hearing loss, even a mild loss. Put the musical chairs away, and take out Apples-to-Apples!

Some parties (especially for young children) can have festive masks, face-painting, and other fund stations. Try a face-painting station for your holiday party instead of using festive masks. Masks can make voices sound muffled and distorted, and also hide very useful facial expressions and lip moments. Further, masks can bother children who use hearing aids, causing unnecessary discomfort. Face paint, temporary tattoo stickers, or face stickers are a better solution to communication, and the festive spirit can still be embraced!

Also, appropriate festive head wear can be important for better hearing. Imagine wearing a woolen Santa hat all day: Your head would be hot and sweaty! Cloth hats are not optimal party headwear for people with hearing aids. Sweat can affect the hearing aid, and the sound quality can be diminished. Also, some cloth hats can knock off hearing devices from an ear when taken off. Paper hats (crowns) and festive headbands are a much better alternative.

If you feel like your hearing isn’t as great as it used to be, get your hearing tested. Give yourself the gift of better hearing this holiday season!

Nov

2021

Musicians are AMAZING Listeners, Find Out Why!

Knowing how to play the 12-bar blues can help with WHAT?! Do you know how to play an instrument? If so, research suggests that you may have an advantage in noise perception both on a behavioural level and on a neural level.

Research shows that long-term musical training helps with speech perception in noisy environments. Specifically, musical training can lead to better auditory encoding, speech motor prediction, and auditory-motor integration that in turn leads to better speech perception. When someone does musical training, their brain develops more enhanced synchronous firing of neurons, more efficient processing of speech, and more neural representations along the ascending auditory pathway (Gazzaniga et al., 2002). In other words, the brain becomes more finely tuned to listening!

Why does musical training help speech perception? Well, speech and music share the same brain circuitry, so training one, trains the other. Furthermore, music exerts additional demands on your neural circuitry; learning an instrument is hard work and takes effort, and this effort strengthens the listening section of your brain. In addition, musical training forces a participant to pay close attention to small details in sound, further strengthening the listening part of your brain. Musicians have better speech perception in noise than non-musicians because they hone their pitch matching abilities. These same skills are used to hear the human voice embedded in a background of other voices.

Maybe it’s time to learn an instrument: It can help your hearing and your brain! Any instrument can work, even your voice!