Hearing loss can be challenging to detect at first: if you don’t hear something, you aren’t aware that you’re missing it. However, other signs may appear that indicate you might be in the beginning stages of hearing loss. One such sign is listener’s fatigue.
What Is Listener’s Fatigue?
Listener’s fatigue (sometimes called listening fatigue) is mental and physical exhaustion caused by the increased mental demand of listening, especially to speech. You’ll most likely experience listener’s fatigue at the end of an event that necessitated extensive listening, such as a meeting, a lecture or even meeting up with friends. You may feel sleepy, have trouble concentrating or feel physically weak.
Types of Hearing Loss
The two main types of hearing loss are conductive hearing loss and sensorineural hearing loss.
- Conductive hearing loss occurs due to damage to the middle or outer ear, which are responsible for collecting sound waves and directing them into the inner ear.
- Sensorineural hearing loss occurs due to damage to the inner ear, which is responsible for transmitting sound information from those sound waves to the brain.
Your Ear and Your Brain
You may think that the act of hearing happens in your ear, but it actually happens in your brain. As mentioned above, the inner ear transmits sound information to the brain in the form of electric signals, which your brain interprets as sound. When you have hearing loss, the brain receives incomplete signals from the ear, either because sound waves didn’t reach the inner ear or because the inner ear could not transmit sound information.
How Hearing Loss Causes Fatigue
When the brain receives incomplete sound signals from the ear, it needs to work harder to compensate for the loss and process sound using less information. Your brain needs and uses energy much like any other organ, and your energy is finite. The increased cognitive load of listening and understanding tires you out quicker than it would if you did not have hearing loss because your brain is using more energy, leaving you with less energy for other functions.
How Hearing Aids Can Help
Hearing aids are one of the most successful ways to combat listener’s fatigue. They bridge the broken connection between your ears and your brain, allowing sound information to reach the brain properly and seamlessly, without needing extra effort on your brain’s part. Moreover, background noise can contribute to listener’s fatigue because it is extra information received by the brain that it needs to filter out, on top of making sense of the sounds you hear. Hearing aids can suppress background noise, lessening the information received in the brain. Call Oregon Ear, Nose & Throat Center today to learn more about hearing aids and listener’s fatigue.