This is a mock-up from Designaffairs Studio. Can’t imagine ever wearing one of these – “Yes, sir, this hearing aid is state of the art, to wear it we simply need to stretch your ear lobe slowly over six months until it is dangling around your mouth”. Me: “uh… the behind the ear model will be fine, thanks”.

It’s great to see people pushing the design of hearing aids. It’s one more step towards the day when hearing aids are as cool and ubiquitous as glasses.

People don’t seem to know what to call the things in my ears.

I’m pretty open about the fact that I can’t hear much and that I wear hearing aids. Most people around me day-to-day know I wear them, some even know I write on here.

I quite often talk with people about hearing loss and aids – sometimes people ask where their Mum/Gran/whoever should go to buy some or what the best one to get is.

And yet people can’t seem to say hearing aids. It’s like they are going to insult me if they say those two words – instead people will make up some other name for them like your ear things or something like that.

But I can’t say that I blame them. When talking to someone about their disability you are on shaky ground and you don’t want to say the wrong thing. Guess I would be the same if I was talking to someone in a wheelchair. Even so, it’s strange that it’s the two words, hearing aids, that prove to always be the hard ones to say.

Living with a hearing loss is like visiting a foreign country and not being able to speak the language.

Melissa Saenz, Ph.D., a postdoc at Caltech, has discovered that the video above can identify people with auditory synesthesia, a condition that can make some people hear music, even though there is no music being played.

From the press statement by Caltech:

“While I was running an experiment at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, a group of students happened to pass by on a tour, and I volunteered to explain what I was doing,” explains Saenz, who, along with Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at Caltech and professor of computation and neural systems, reports the finding in the August 5 issue of the journal Current Biology.

“As part of the experiment, a moving display was running on my computer screen with dots rapidly expanding out, somewhat like the opening scene of Star Wars. Out of the blue, one of the students asked, “Does anyone else hear something when you look at that?” After talking to him further, I realized that his experience had all the characteristics of a synesthesia: an automatic sensory cross-activation that he had experienced all of his life,” says Saenz.

A search of the synesthesia literature revealed that auditory synesthesia–of any kind–had never been reported. Intrigued, Saenz began to look for other individuals with the same ability, using the original movie seen by the student as a test. “I queried a few hundred people and three more individuals turned up,” she says. “Having that specific example made it easy to find more people. That movie just happens to be quite “noisy” to the synesthetes and was a great screening tool. When asked if it made a sound, one of the individuals responded, “how could it not?” I would have been less successful had I just generally asked, “Do you hear sounds when you see things move or flash?” because in the real environment, things that move often really do make a sound,” for example, a buzzing bee.

This may be why auditory synesthesia hadn’t been detected by neurobiologists. “People with auditory synesthesia may be even less likely than people with other synesthetic associations to fully realize that their experience is unusual. These individuals have an enhanced soundtrack in life, rather than a dramatically different experience, compared to others,” says Saenz. However, when asked, all of the synesthetes could name examples of daily visual events that caused sounds that they logically knew to be only in their minds, such as seeing a fluttering butterfly or watching television with the sound turned off.

Press release: Caltech Neurobiologists Discover Individuals Who “Hear” Movement…

–>“Hearing-motion” Demo…

From Medgadget.

Designer hearing aids sporting Pompey’s crest are being offered for children to wear.

Portsmouth Football Club and hearing aid manufacturer Starkey Laboratories have together been tackling the stigma attached to wearing hearing aids by offering a special design carrying the team crest.

Suzie Butcher, from Starkey Laboratories, said: ‘Many children suffering with hearing problems can experience bullying and feelings of embarrassment from hearing aid use.

‘Starkey has seen a fantastic response from children who have opted for a football- designed aid – it really transforms it from being something children can be ashamed of to an object of aspiration.’

Lucius Peart, brand and marketing director at Portsmouth Football Club, said: ‘We are really pleased to be supporting the Better Hearing Initiative with Starkey.

‘It’s a fantastic idea to use football in this way and it provides children with hearing difficulties with something they can be proud of wearing.’

I started losing my hearing at the age of 5, I’m now 36 and have a moderate/severe loss in both ears – it started with a mild loss and it has got steadily worse over the years. Apart from a few years in my early teens, I’ve been wearing hearing aids the whole time. I’ve developed a number of coping strategies, often without even realising it, that help me get through conversations with other people.

It would be easy for me to write on here that you should always ask someone to repeat themselves when you haven’t heard – in fact, I have written that before and you should ask them, but once your hearing and listening ability gets bad enough it become too much of a chore to keep getting people to repeat themselves. It’s annoying for you and it’s annoying for the people talking. Instead of doing that I:

1. Read lips on the sly

I think I’ve become a pretty good lip reader. I never stare directly at someone’s mouth as I think a lot of people get unnerved by it and I like to look someone in the eye when I’m talking to them. Yet I still stealth-read their lips, I pick up just enough from my peripheral vision to help me work out their words.

2. Read facial expressions and body language

It’s amazing what you can pick up when you watch someone closely. I often use this to work out if someone is expecting an answer from me or if they are just talking at me. If I know they want an answer and I heard nothing at all then I can ask them to repeat it.

3. Fill the gaps

I do this a lot. I might have heard a couple of words of a sentence and if I’ve picked up enough to get an idea of what they are on about I just go with that. Yeah, it leads to mistakes and sometimes embarrassing out-of-context answers but it works often too.

4. Just nod or say Yeah

I do this far more than I should. If I’ve heard a bit of what someone is saying and I don’t think it’s worth making the effort to fully understand then I just respond with a generic answer and let it go.

5. Get in early

If someone is talking too quietly and I can’t hear anything they are saying then I have to cut straight in as quickly as I can and tell them I can’t hear them. The longer you leave them talking the harder it is to tell them that you didn’t hear a word of it.

6. Look for the good places

Different places have different acoustics and people sound differently in different situations. There a few meeting areas in our office that are small and have glass-panel sides so people are close and the sounds bounce stay boxed in – I always try and hold meetings there.

7. Face people

My hearing aids are set up so that I can hear more from in front of me than I can from the sides or back so I always turn to look at the person talking – this can mean a lot of head-swivelling in groups!

8. Use others

Maybe I can’t hear the person talking so well but I can hear someone else in the group. I listen more to the answers from the other person to work out what the person I can’t hear is saying.

9. Stay quiet

It’s all too easy to lost the conversation in a group and it is much harder to ask someone to repeat themselves when the rest of the group heard OK and the conversation moved on. So I just drop out of the conversation altogether.

10. Look busy/grumpy or avoid

If I see someone I know I have trouble hearing and I don’t have the energy for listening I occasionally look like I’m in a bad mood or am busy to avoid conversation or I avoid being near them altogether.

Why do I do all these things?

I don’t do any of these things to hide my hearing loss or hearing aids, I have no problem with people knowing that I wear hearing aids – in fact, I go out of my way to mention it to a lot of people. I do it because I don’t always have the energy to hear everything I want to. It is hard work. I am incredibly grateful for the times when I can listen to someone and understand without making any effort, the times when listening is easy – I can relax then, but that happens less and less as the years go by.

A list of things that everyone with hearing loss needs to know. Useful for those having problems with their hearing aids or those thinking of buying their first pair.

Hearing aids won’t give you back the perfect hearing you had as a child

By far the most common type of hearing loss is sensorineural hearing loss ; this is damage to the tiny nerves in the inner ear that pick up sounds and send them to your brain. A hearing aid amplifies and changes sounds coming into your ear but those sounds still have to pass through the damaged nerves. A hearing aid will do a great job of changing speech sounds so that you have a better chance of understanding them, but your broken ear still has to process them and that’s why a hearing aid won’t fix your hearing loss and give you back the hearing you had when your were ten years old.

We hear with our ears, but listen with our brains

Our ears collect sounds and send them to our brains. Sounds come into the ear and brush against those nerves (the broken ones) and when those nerves move they send messages to the brain. The important thing is: It’s our brain that interprets those sounds, recognizes words and allows us to understand speech.

Understanding what people say is a bigger problem than hearing them

Louder is not always better. Have you ever asked someone to speak up and you still couldn’t make out what they said even though they were loud enough? When you have damaged nerves sending information to your brain you are not receiving all the information that you need to understand speech – so even though you can hear someone you cannot understand what they are saying. Using a hearing aid is not just about making things louder – if it was then fixing hearing loss would be easy.

The longer you leave your hearing loss untreated, the less effective hearing aids will be

Many, many people will not seek help for their hearing loss for many years after they first experience problems. This is a very common problem. What people don’t realise though is that by putting off getting fitted with hearing aids they are reducing their ability to understand speech even after they have been fitted with aids.

If you sit on a sofa all day every day then your leg muscles gradually reduce in size because they aren’t being used. If you don’t often do arithmetic then you lose the ability to quickly add up numbers. If you aren’t getting well-formed and understandable sounds into your brain then, over time, your brain stops being able to understand them. It’s kind of the opposite of practice makes perfect. If you don’t get hearing aids when you need them then you are spending more time hearing “mmpppnnnppphhhhh” instead of what was really said and you gradually lose that understanding.

It takes time to adjust to hearing new and different sounds

When you get fitted with a new pair of hearing aids you will be experiencing a lot of sounds that you haven’t heard in a while. It takes time for your to adjust to hearing and understanding those new sounds – different people take different amounts of time and it also depends on how bad your hearing loss is.

When buying a new pair of hearing aids you absolutely must use them as much as you can during your trial period to give yourself the best chance of getting used to them and deciding if they are the right ones for you.

It can be difficult to work out where sounds are coming from

A common problem for hearing aid wearers and those with hearing loss is trying to determine where a sound is coming from – this is also known as localisation. Many, many times over the years I have heard someone speak but have not been able to work out where they are and have to spin around to locate them – this is a particular problem in business meetings and other group situations where lots of people are talking from different places around you.

This is a problem for hearing aid wearers because having something in your ear changes the way sounds enter the ear canal – rather than sounds bouncing into your ear in a natural way they now have to go through your hearing aid. I found that wearing IIC hearing aids helped a lot because they are tiny and sit very deep in the canal, which lets the sounds enter naturally – wearing RIC or Open Fit may help too.

As an aside: have you ever watched a dog when it is listening to something? It will rotate its ears to pick up the sound better – that’s it localising the sounds.

Our ears work as a pair

We have two ears for good reason and they work as a pair to help us hear. Even though we can’t rotate our ears like a dog our brains can still receive sounds from the left or right and that is a big help to understand where the sound is coming from. Our pair of ears play a big part in our ability to balance on our feet.

If you have a hearing loss in both ears then you must buy two hearing aids. If you don’t then the world is going to sound like a very uneven place. If money is an issue and you are tempted to buy one aid instead of two then, in my opinion, it is better to buy two cheaper hearing aids.

All modern hearing aids come with a phone programme, it’s a setting that the hearing aid automatically switches to when you put a phone to your ear. The programme normally reduces the volume of the sound coming from the phone and, I think, also reduces pitch to try and eliminate any feedback that might occur from having a phone pressed to your ear.

I’ve never been happy with the phone programme on any of my hearing aids.

They are effective in reducing feedback when making a call but they are also great at making sure I can’t hear a damn thing on the phone! I’ve taken to using a cellphone most of the time these days as they don’t cause the programme to kick in.

I’ve got an appointment with an audiologist next week to get the programme switched off and sort this out once and for all.

How do you cope with using the telephone? Does the phone programme work for you or do you find yourself holding the receiver away from your ear to try and stop the programme kicking in?

A Dad was left deaf in one ear and needing a walking stick after a twig spiked his eardrum as he mowed the lawn.

Mike Watson, 56, brushed past a bush and a branch poked into his right ear, knocking him out for several minutes.

Mike, who has five kids, managed to crawl indoors and dial 999. He was rushed to hospital with a four inch piece of twig still sticking out of his ear. But despite emergency surgery he lost his hearing and now can’t balance properly. Mike said, “It was horrific, a billion-to-one chance. The doctor said it was the worst ear damage he’d seen”.

A researcher at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol wants to meet people diagnosed with impaired hearing but avoid wearing their aids. The Royal National Institute for the Deaf estimates nine million people in the UK have some degree of hearing loss but only 1.4 million use aids. Psychology student, Claire Calvert wants to find out if there is a stigma attached to the look of hearing aids. She is also interested to know what the general public’s perception is.

Ms Calvert, from UWE’s Centre for Appearance Research, said: “The aim of my study is to try to understand why people diagnosed with hearing impairments do not wear their hearing aids regularly in relation to appearance and stigma-related concerns. It is hoped that the information will help in the development of methods of meeting the needs of users more effectively, and improve their quality of life. I am also interested in the general public’s perceptions of hearing aids and hearing aid users.”

If you would like to take part in this study or would like more information please contact Claire Calvert by e-mail: claire.calvert@live.uwe.ac.uk or the Centre for Appearance Research at UWE on: 0117 328 3967.