Hearing Health Blog Archive
This is a story of resilience, dark humor, and the technical challenge of mixing audio when your brain processes sound through a handful of electrodes instead of thousands of hair cells.
Why is a particular gene silent in a mouse supporting cell but active in a chicken supporting cell? Is the difference epigenetic? Are regulatory regions locked down in mammals? These are the kinds of questions we can now pursue systematically.
Whether you are a casual giver or a long-time philanthropist, understanding these changes—and utilizing tools like a donor-advised fund (DAF)—can help your dollars go much further.
Using the new biosensor, we discovered that zinc signaling is directly involved in how the brain processes sound in the auditory cortex during sound processing and in the amygdala during aversive responses.
Hearing loss doesn’t have to be the end. It can feel like it, but it doesn’t have to be. Music is still possible. Life is still possible. There are ways to regain control, ways to find your own authorship through understanding. I want people to know that.
Younger and older adults improved at similar rates from lower levels of noise—meaning that both groups benefited equally from better listening conditions. But older adults needed a head start: They needed lower levels of background noise to reach the same accuracy.
As shown on “The Pitt,” when an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter is unavailable or real-time captioning is missing, vital information is lost, leading to diagnostic and treatment delays.
Serotonin seems to quiet down excitatory neurons while boosting inhibitory ones. This differential modulation may help us to understand the role of serotonin in auditory disorders such as tinnitus and age-related hearing loss.
Today, I wear my “HARD OF HEARING” hoodie proudly because I’m no longer hiding from my hearing loss.
In addition to conducting research, I realized that prevention is just as important, or even more important than treatment. Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is becoming increasingly prevalent among Gen Z—my peers—due to increased access to personal listening devices and loud entertainment events.
Auracast promises something long imagined but never fully realized: a standardized, open broadcast that allows audience members to receive high-quality audio directly in their own hearing aids, earbuds, or smartphones. This happens without venue-specific hardware, without checkout counters, and without the stigma or inconvenience of borrowed devices.
The internship last summer provided my first real chance to step into hearing science and learn the experimental side of speech perception under the tutelage of a senior researcher.
Our new public service announcement “Let’s Listen Smart” recognizes that life is loud—and it’s also fun. And the last thing we want to do is stop having fun! We just need to listen responsibly.
Hearing contributes directly to independence, confidence, and how actively people participate in daily routines, and regular hearing checks deserve the same kind of attention people already give to routine doctor or dental visits.
We are proud that Hearing Health Foundation-funded scientists are always well represented at Association for Research in Otolaryngology MidWinter Meeting.
For individuals with long-term hearing loss or severely degraded auditory input, the lack of reliable auditory feedback represents a challenge many orders of magnitude greater than the temporary masking used in this study.
It bears repeating: What improves access for a group with a specific disability invariably also helps the greater population.
Because noise-canceling earbuds are so comfortable and block everything out, people wear them for three, four, five hours straight without realizing the cumulative effect on their ears.
I made one hat to solve problems, never imagining how many other adults and children would relate. It’s an honor to be able to give something back to the cochlear implant community that understands this journey so well.
These findings suggest that the ability to integrate what is seen with what is heard becomes increasingly important with age, especially for cochlear implant users.
Tinnitus Quest’s Tinnitus Hackathon prioritized active problem-solving, cross-disciplinary debate, and the development of a shared research agenda.
As the first known Black author to publish a 10-book children’s series centered on deaf, hard of hearing, and disabled heroes, I’ve created what I once longed for: stories where children see themselves as powerful.
Social platforms have become spaces to compare symptoms, crowdsource explanations, and seek community. For tinnitus, that openness has helped many people feel less alone. Unfortunately, it has also created space for confusion, misinformation, and discouraging myths that can delay effective care.
Often these surprising sources of loud sounds come about from a misguided belief that loud means fun—the louder it is, the more festive. The good news? Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, turning it down even a little can help save our hearing a lot.
When thinking about exposure to loud sounds, it is important to take a life-course perspective. That is, the health behaviors developed in childhood and adolescence can shape habits into adulthood.
I know the only way I could hear it is if we all stopped playing and moved up to the net every time someone has something to say.
The team’s analysis uncovered a surprising diversity of supporting cells, the “non-sensory cellular guardians” that surround and protect the sensory hair cells and may facilitate their regeneration
It seems paradoxical that a hearing condition intended to work against me could give me the power to truly understand music, but this battle has taught me more about positivity and hope than any motivational speech could.
What these findings make clear is that audiologists are carrying an enormous clinical load. Much of what surrounds that load does not require their specialized training.