Approximately 15% of all American adults report experiencing some degree of hearing trouble. While hearing loss is not always preventable, you can slow down the process by practicing listening and training your ears and brain. One way to do this is by listening to audiobooks.
How Hearing Loss Occurs
The most common type of hearing loss is sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). Your ear is picking up sound signals, but either struggles to transmit those signals to the brain or the brain itself struggles to process the signals and perceive sound. This occurs due to the degeneration or damage of the organs in your inner ear, the auditory nerve or the auditory processing center in the brain.
SNHL is not characterized by the feeling that all sounds have been turned down; instead, certain types of sounds and specific scenarios become more challenging for the listener. One of the biggest challenges with SNHL—in both advanced and early stages—is understanding speech, especially in loud environments with a lot of background noise or competing sounds.
Audiobooks as Auditory Training
Auditory training is a type of therapy that focuses on improving your auditory and listening skills. It’s a way to exercise your brain’s ability to recognize and interpret specific sounds. With audiobooks, you’re exercising the brain’s ability to understand speech. Just like with any exercise, this strengthens the muscles in your ears and brain that may be deteriorating with SNHL, thereby slowing the progression of hearing loss.
How Listening to Audiobooks Combats Hearing Loss
- Enhanced speech perception. Practice your ability to hear speech, understand what the speaker is saying and follow a conversation.
- Strengthened listening comprehension. Understanding words is only half of the audiobook experience; you also need to remember events, character names and backstory in order to follow the plot.
- Combat listener’s fatigue. Long conversations can be exhausting for people with hearing loss, leading to a phenomenon known as listener’s fatigue. The length of audiobooks allows you to practice staying engaged in a conversation for prolonged periods of time
- Pure enjoyment. Listening to an engaging story or learning something interesting from a nonfiction book is a fun activity! You can get all of the above benefits without feeling like you’re doing hard work.
If you’re interested in combating hearing loss and strengthening your hearing ability and listening skills, consider audiobooks! And if you have any questions about audiobooks or auditory training, give Gary D. Schwartzberg, Au.D., Doctor of Audiology a call. We’d be happy to give you more information or schedule an appointment.