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Being Deaf: How Different The World is Without Hearing

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Being Deaf: How Different The World is Without Hearing

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If you have never imagined how your world would be if you were not able to hear, you need to read this article. It gives you the perspective of a deaf person . It can be a lonely life. We take for granted how lucky we are to have this sense in conjuction with all of the other senses.

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Technology makes life so easy, and advances at such a breakneck clip, that sometimes we forget that all the tech in the world still can't change the way some people experience the world. David Peter explains how the world works for the deaf.
At 21, I'm the youngest employee at 1000memories, the startup where I work ¹. I'm also their first deaf employee. At a startup, I likely always will be the first. For a startup to succeed, the team must communicate well together. Since I can't hear, that presents a large challenge for my employers.

On top of that, there are certain things about being deaf that people have never considered, understate, or are mistaken about -so I must clear up exactly what being deaf means. Not understanding what it means risks my productivity and personal happiness. Being a programmer is my current profession, so there will be concrete examples about how being deaf affects me professionally as well as personally.

Solitude

I've been with 1000memories for almost a year, and I leave in two weeks to attend Hacker School. I still feel lonely sometimes. If your reflex is "everyone feels lonely sometimes," you would be right. But you would also be understating the loneliness we feel.

Deafness means I don't understand anyone. When someone talks at lunch, I want to know what they say. I miss out on the daily conversation, the back-and-forth, the friendships made after propinquity. And the worst part is that I don't have a choice in the matter.

Five years ago, I received a cochlear implant: a tiny technological machine implanted into my cochlea that fires electric bursts to help me hear. I had to learn sound all over again. I almost didn't qualify for the cochlear implant operation because, even at 16, I was considered too old. Teaching a child language gets exponentially harder as they grow. It's the same with hearing. I still can't tell the difference between "b" and "g," among many others. I might never, but there's no point not trying.

In the past few months, I've felt like I'm the last person to know about things. I'm constantly surprised when something happened or changed. Once, an engineer left to work from Seattle the same week the two other engineers on the team left to present at RailsConf 2012. When I discovered that I would be the only engineer in the office the entire week, it was after everyone else had all gone.

It seems like a solution is just to ask more questions. I knew the engineer who was presenting at RailsConf Wednesday, but maybe I should have asked who else was going and how long he'd be gone? Maybe. I need to work on getting these questions to occur to me. It's hard when I still don't know these people very well, and haven't learned the social norms because I've never heard them.

Another solution is to somehow know what everyone else is doing. The engineers use Google docs to store priorities and to-do lists. We started using Yammer to keep the team up-to-date. That one isn't working too well - we get an email about every two weeks by a cofounder to use Yammer more. But the idea is to keep everyone up-to-date. Basically, company-wide toilet tweeting.

Group conversations

In an open office like this, it's very easy to drop in on a conversation and add something. But without understanding what people say, the chance you can do that drops to zero. This is especially problematic in company meetings. The only way I can participate is with access services.

1000memories is still a startup, so we can't afford full-time access services. But for our most important meetings, the cofounders went through considerable expense to get me transcribers. With them, meetings are a bit better.

Since we work in an open office, parts of the team often chat with each other, especially at lunch. I always miss out on these talks, which are full of snippets of information no matter how bad the signal-to-noise ratio. This is really taken for granted. Any off-topic comment hints at an entire life to discover.

My best friend, then interning at Causes, kept telling me about random tips he picked up from other programmers because they were always chatting about new tricks they learned. This is how I learned about git log -S.

Have I told anyone about these problems? Have I taught anyone how to communicate with me? Yes to both. The result is no one uses the communication method after the initial novelty. The excuse my coworkers use for not practicing is "I need to practice." And then they keep on talking to you online rather than real life because it's easier and more familiar. That's because we're human, really.

I should have made it clear that Cued Speech was important to me. Startups are busy as bees, and people have other priorities. And I suspect I taught them too far down the line, because it was two months before I would be gone. Something I'll take away from this experience.

In a chat with a cofounder, I told him that I felt like I didn't have friends. I became jealous whenever a coworker talked to another and not me. It felt like a girlfriend talking to another guy. When they laugh and I'm unable to understand why, it feels like a punch in the gut, a giant inside joke I'm not part of. Maybe I should ask to explain the joke, even though most of the humor would be lost, because at least I would know.

I participate in conversations less than the quietest person I've met - not by choice, entirely. You should never want to be average - unless you are below average. This is a cry for normalcy, when so many others wish to be abnormal.

Love

Being deaf especially sucks when it comes to love. You can't ever love someone unless you've talked to them. So how do you communicate effectively? Everything I've ever thought of is awkward, because none of them are ever normal. Social norms are norms because they are what people expect.

I've talked to people "normally." It's hard, it's error-prone, and we have to repeat a lot. That's never a good recipe for love. It's hard to have awesome conversations when you have to repeat every other thing you say and are never sure whether the other person understood.

I could try to find a deaf girl. However, I don't want my kids to have an increased chance of deafness. Even if they come out hearing, we'd need to make sure they're raised right - who will teach them how to talk? And I don't identify with Deaf culture, which takes pride in being deaf. I accept that deafness is part of me, but it's just there. Like the fact I have black hair.

I could use an online dating site, like OKCupid. However, these are self-selected pools of people. There is a specific audience that goes to each site, and you still have to learn subtle communication skills which I currently lack.

I could do many other things (and am!) - exercise, dress well, maximize exposure. But in the end, I'm deaf. The most important thing is that I find someone who communicates well with me.

Job interviews

Let me tell you a story in the present tense.

This morning, I get my fifth or seventh email from a large company in Washington. The second recruiter's trying to clarify some things, and she tells me that she'll be looking for an interrupter [sic] for my over-the-phone interview.

I ask to clarify this point. Since I'm deaf, having an interpreter for a phone interview wouldn't be very useful since the interpreter would be in Washington and I'm not, right? Would they actually be hiring an interpreter in San Francisco? How was this going to work?

In her next email, the recruiter delegates me to her manager, the third recruiter. At the end of the email is a copy-pasted message to be sure to fill out the necessary application for the interview. All interns have seen this application. I do not want to fill it out if they botch the interpreter.

Her manager tells me that she'll contact my college for access services and that we'll be using Live Meeting for the interview. She'll even do a test with me.

Unfortunately I have no idea what Live Meeting is. A quick search on Google tells me Live Meeting is basically Skype, but with no clues on how to download it.

I end up never starting the interview.

Accessibility in interview applications

For most company interview applications, they ask for a phone number without alternatives. I put a random note where I can. Something like "Since I'm deaf, I can't do a phone interview, but you can reach me at..." at the end of the "Why do you want to work for us?" question. I never hear back from these. I don't know if it's whether they never saw my note, whether they rejected my resume silently, or whether they attempted calling my phone number (which doesn't take calls).

Last time I applied, even Google didn't provide alternatives. It was a beta application, though when I emailed a recruiter in charge of my college about it, she was very helpful and understanding.

HR is behind the times. There is no reason interviewing over the phone is better than interviewing on video with typewith.me, Skype, or Gmail chat. I've done all of these, and it's always turned out that the programmers preferred to conduct those interviews this way.

Screencasts, talks, and video tutorials

When I was trying to learn Rails, I soon found out that a large chunk of popular tutorials were uncaptioned screencasts or videos - a huge body of knowledge I'm unable to tap into. Even Khan Academy went uncaptioned until recently when an independent group helped out. So many uncaptioned videos exist because minorities are not prioritized.

Since I can't listen to talks, I have to make-do with slides. Slides almost never go into the depth a talk does: it's all surface knowledge.

In the end, I learned programming by a combination of getting lucky, enrolling in formal classes, poring over books, Googling, finding Stack Overflow, and making things, making things, making things.

Access services

There are three layers involved in translation: the messenger herself, the interpreter, and me. I hear what someone says through the lens of someone who probably doesn't know programming.

As university subjects get harder, access services get worse. In Probability class a year ago, we learned about second derivatives and gamma probability functions, and the typist that my college hired for this class was typing a transcription indistinguishable from a novel written by a chimpanzee. Typists are not required to learn the prerequisites, nor do they have to learn along with the student. They just type what they think they hear.

It's like playing a game of Telephone - the classic example of lossy communication. Which means it is never, ever as good.

The only good access service I've ever gotten is Cued Speech. In a basic sense, Cued Speech is a system that uses signs for sound. It was invented to battle the spectacularly low deaf literacy rate. (The average reading level of deaf 17- and 18-year-olds is at the fourth grade level. ²) With Cued Speech, I see exactly what the messenger says, without ambiguity. The only error arises when the transliterator mishears the person. Unfortunately, in college, I'm not offered Cued Speech due to politics not worth mentioning, and Cued Speech is not widespread.

Deaf culture

I never considered myself part of Deaf culture. It arose because, I suspect, we were lonely. It's the same for any minority. Except this time, Deaf culture came together because of a common language everyone could understand - American Sign Language. I've heard the stories. Deaf people entering college for the first time. Finding other deaf students. Suddenly, during their first sleepless night, they're making up for all the conversations they had missed.

Some become angry at the hearing world. They went so long without feeling like they belonged. Without feeling loved.

Some don't think deafness is a disability; it's just a way of life. After all, we can do anything except hear. But I don't want to be part of the Deaf world, which seems so cloistered sometimes. I want to be part of the larger world - and out here, not being able to hear is a pretty significant disadvantage.

Friends

Despite the constant communication barriers, I've really grown into a good programmer during my time at 1000memories. I've learned how to communicate with others, what the real world is like, how to do behavior-driven development, mastered JavaScript, and even submitted a patch for Ruby on Rails. They gave me a chance prove myself as a programmer - and, in these past few months, a friend ³.

Nine months had passed since my inception as a bumbling intern before I admitted to a cofounder that I was feeling lonely. It happened after one social bowling night, when a scheduling mistake caused us to wait in the alley for an hour and a half chatting in a noisy environment. I stood off to the side, feeling stupid, watching my coworkers laugh. I didn't want to see that. As soon as I collapsed back in my apartment, I cried. Then a little thought went off in my head: Shouldn't someone know about this? So I wrote an email.

The next morning the cofounder read my email. He invited me for a chat over breakfast. When he let me into his apartment, I was surprised and a little guilty when I saw his eyes. That moment was the most vulnerable I ever saw him. Of course, you idiot, I thought right then. Founders get lonely, too.

We had bagels at his couch. It took a long time before either of us started talking. I began with what my life used to be three years ago, when I was a completely different person. I was so passive and shy I couldn't look anyone in the eye. I blamed everything. I depended on everyone. I was content to live life as a cog in an industrial machine. I just wanted an easy life and die of old age. Until I went to college.

In college, I was depressed and bored. I felt like I was missing something. Then someone I knew died. And another. I realized I wasn't missing anything. Happiness is a verb. And now, the me of three years ago wouldn't be able to recognize who I am.

The cofounder and I went through what we could do to make my life at work better. Part of my contract involved a budget for speech therapy, something I never took advantage of. I brought up teaching Cued Speech. He mentioned that, at lunch, I could nudge someone and ask what we were talking about. We talked about going back to college, living in the adult world, and finding love.

I walked away feeling like we could be friends.

The founders of 1000memories gave permission to post this to the public, and helped look over this essay with me.

As concluded in a study by the Gallaudet Research Institute. However, it's 15 years old. The level has probably risen since then, but there are no new studies to replace that statistic. My time at 1000memories is the happiest I've ever been in my life. The other founder has begun telling me what people said. I joke with my coworkers. A coworker/friend also told me in an IM conversation: have i not mentioned this to you?
crap. i hate it when i leave you out of stuff.
David Peter is a Computer Science major at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He's a hacker-someone who makes things. He worked at 1000memories before leaving for Hacker School. You can join in the discussion about David's piece over at the Hacker News thread.
Image credit wavebreakmedia ltd/Shutterstock Republished with permission

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Being Deaf: How Different the World Is Without Hearing

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Technology makes life so easy, and advances at such a breakneck clip, that sometimes we forget that all the tech in the world still can't change the way some people experience the world. David Peter explains how the world works for the deaf.

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Connecting with others is a very important part of our life and most of us have never given any thought to how hearing is fundamental in helping us connect with people and even with our pets. Having a conversation can evoke emotions and depending on what you are hearing you can feel sympathy, anger, sadness or joy, among other feelings. Inability to hear can make one feel disconnected from the world, it can lead to anxiety and depression.

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The ability to hear is such an ingrained part of life, we often miss it entirely. It's just there. 24/7. And so, many of us simply take our hearing health for granted. We've never experienced life without it.

Yet, talk to people who have experienced hearing loss - even mild hearing loss - and you quickly discover what hearing does for us on a daily basis, without us being aware of what's going on in there. You don't miss it until it's gone. We can learn from those who no longer have nature's gift of hearing, or from those who were never blessed with the ability to hear clearly.

These people overcome hurdles everyday about which most of us know nothing. By taking a closer look at hearing and its importance in life's quality, one may understand how important treating hearing loss is.

Hearing and Connecting with Others.

Hearing is connecting

We learn to speak by imitating the sounds we hear.

Even the most eloquent speaker starts small - with "Mama" and "Dada" and other simple words. Mothers and fathers teach their children to speak by speaking to them. The children hear the sounds and imitate them.

Soon, we develop a larger vocabulary, learning new words every day. As more time passes, we learn to "hear" between the lines. We recognize, not only words, but tone. Is the speaker being sarcastic or are the sentiments expressed genuine? "Nice job, Fred" can mean "you've done a good job, Fred," or it can mean just the opposite - depending on the tone used by the speaker.

There's nuance in speaking and our ears deliver the speakers sound waves to the hearing centers of the brain for processing. We develop a database of "sounds." The dog says "Bow-wow," the cow says "moo." The ability to process sounds enables us to connect with others in numerous ways and on very different levels.

A conversation with a friend creates personal connectivity, evoking emotions of friendship, sympathy, connectivity - a sense of belonging, a basic human need. Conversely, listening to the evening news keeps us informed of the things happening in the world. The words spoken by the newscaster may also enlighten, engage or even anger us.

The ability to communicate - to hear, process sound and respond - makes life more engaging, interesting, fun and infuriating. Yes, there's a direct link between your ability to hear and your ability to feel emotions. Without hearing, we're often left out.

Just how important is this ability to communicate? Well, routinely, newborns undergo a hearing test at birth and if hearing loss is diagnosed, even newborns as young as two months can be fitted with hearing aids that enable them to learn speech.

Even more importantly, these youngsters will mainstream through school, learn algebra and become a contributing member of the society. And it all starts with the ability to hear.

Think about that the next time you expose your ears to five straight hours of tunes on your MP3 player. When ears are exposed to loud noise over a long period of time, the hearing mechanism is damaged. And your connectivity with others is at risk. How often do you say "What?" throughout the day?

Emotional Happiness

Studies have shown untreated hearing loss can lead to isolation which often leads to depression, anxiety and disconnect from the rest of the world.

Smell the fresh air and listen, that's if you can

Life without the ability to engage others in conversation limits what we can accomplish, placing road blocks in the way of the full realization of our talents, personal strengths, our opinions and our ability to engage others on the job, at home and around town. In fact a study carried out by the Better Hearing Institute (BHI) found that persons with untreated hearing loss earned less income per year - the hearing loss limiting their earning power.

The link between hearing and happiness is sometimes overlooked, even by family members, friends and health care providers.

Simple sounds such as music and sound of nature elicit emotions that are definitely missed when hearing loss exists.

You may not grasp the emotional impact of hearing loss because you hear well, but there is in fact a link between your emotional state and your ability to hear. Don't believe it?

Try wearing ear plugs for a day at the office. Experience hearing loss on an experimental level to better appreciate the relationship between the act of hearing and happiness. The two are inexorably linked.

Spatial Placement

The ability to hear contributes to our understanding of where we are in space.

Speak from the podium and you pick up room tone, subtle shifts in audience interest and other extraneous cues to our place in space. Ears define where we are at the moment, whether in a crowded, noisy restaurant or taking a walk along the quiet path through the woods. Hearing the sounds around us allow us and our brain to understand where we are in respect our surrounding environment.

We hear echoes, sounds the bounce back to us that identify objects. It's a form of echo-location - placing the self within the physical context of our surroundings. Without the ability to hear, we lose this ability to place ourselves. The result? Life loses dimensionality. We no longer live in a multi-dimensional world when we can't define place ourselves into the context of our surroundings.

Safety

Hearing and safety go hand-in-hand.

Your ability to hear a warning bell or alarm protects you from danger. The ability to hear cars coming toward us or horns honking provides enough time to get out of the way. A shout from a friend or coworker of potential danger goes unheard and, suddenly, we're confronted from an unheard danger. In fact, we often hear danger before we see it.

The ability to hear keeps us safe and protects us from harm every day. We just don't recognize the role hearing plays in our safety because it's an innate ability - and a blessing that identifies danger before it can harm us.

Quality of Life

Imagine life without music. Imagine life without the beautiful sounds of nature - the twittering birds, the babbling brook, the rumble of thunder in the distance. Hearing well is living life to the fullest.

A study released by the National Council on Aging (NCOA) in 1999 found that untreated hearing loss was associated with quality of life issues such as sadness, depression, anxiety, insecurity, and irritability - that have a negative impact on our overall well-being. Not surprisingly, the study also indicated that hearing loss affects both the individuals with the loss, as well as their families.

There's beauty in the sounds that surround us if we only take the time to listen.

From the soft whisper of a grandchild to the ability to hear your manager at work, sounds add much to life's quality. We can work longer, be productive, and enjoy the music that is woven into the fabric of daily life.

Sounds are all around us. We may hear them, but do we listen to them? Some of us do. Some don't.

And how to make that choice when you choose to live with untreated hearing loss? You don't, you make the choice to miss out on all the sounds in life that enrich our well being and the well being of those around us.

Choose to listen to the world around you. Choose to treat your hearing loss and discover what you've been missing. You'll like what you hear.

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The ability to hear is such an ingrained part of life, we often miss it entirely. talk to people who have experienced hearing loss, even mild hearing loss, and you quickly discover what hearing does for us on a daily basis.

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Hearing With Your Ears, Listening With Your Brain

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Hearing With Your Ears, Listening With Your Brain

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This article by Jerker Rönnberg talks about hearing and cognition. Are we hearing what was said to us correctly? Maybe the better question is: are we comprehending or encoding the message correctly? Sometimes we can miss out on verbal cues due to “adverse listening conditions.” Meaning, too many conversations going on at one time, other things occupying the mind, or hearing disabilities. This can have an effect on an individual’s emotions and their perception of another’s.

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Imagine yourself at a reception, chatting one on one with another guest. You struggle to hear everything the person is saying amid the din of surrounding conversation, but even though you miss a word here and there, you have enough context to understand the gist of what the person is telling you.

In this situation, you are relying on different kinds of knowledge, including contextual cues and relevant memories, to process the information you receive. This knowledge is critical not only for those trying to converse in a noisy room but also for people with hearing impairments, who must rely on knowledge in this way for just about every conversation they have.

Scientists in recent years have grown increasingly aware of the integral role cognition plays in communication, and this awareness has spawned a new field of research called cognitive hearing science. This field examines the way our minds process the auditory signals being sent to the brain, factor in the complexity of what we're listening to, and adjust to the quality of listening conditions.

The findings from this field hold particular significance for people with hearing impairments, whose inner ears don't capture complete auditory information for the brain to process. Long-term effects of insufficient bottom-up signal processing may affect what is stored in the brain, sometimes causing a negative cycle; without understanding, knowledge is not updated, which in turn leads to reduced understanding in the future.

A New Model

Recent models of language understanding under adverse or distracting conditions have emphasized the complex interactions among language signal, working memory capacity (WMC) and related executive functions, and episodic and semantic long-term memory (LTM).

Cortical, top-down processes such as working memory (WM) and attention play important roles for very early, as well as late, stages in language processing. Bottom-up factors relying on the cochlea, the auditory portion of the inner ear, are associated with phonological and linguistic processing. Depending on the listening task and how adverse the listening conditions are, these bottom-up and top-down processes interact at different levels in the auditory system.

My colleagues and I have developed a model that addresses this bottom-up-top-down interaction. The Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model builds on the assumption that the brain "Rapidly, Automatically, and Multimodally Binds PHOnological" information together and represents it in a very short-term buffer we call RAMBPHO. In ideal listening conditions, the RAMBPHO input matches a sufficient number of phonological attributes in the mental lexicon - the systematic organization of vocabulary stored in our mind - and triggers our brains to access and comprehend words rapidly and implicitly, which updates our knowledge. But if hearing is impaired - either through a physical disability or simply because of competing noise - WM kicks in to support listening. Using both phonological and semantic LTM, we fill in, or infer, missing information, which then feeds back to and primes RAMBPHO for its next input.

The topic of the conversation or the regional accent of the person speaking to us are examples of the semantic and phonological kinds of priming, respectively. The output of the system is some level of understanding or perceived gist, which in turn induces a semantic framing of the next explicit loop. To conceptualize the time scale on which the explicit loop operates, consider what happens when two people in a dialogue take turns speaking. Every turn primes RAMBPHO, so the system is undergoing constant dynamic changes, optimizing brain work all the time. Another output from the system is episodic LTM, where information encoded into LTM is dependent on the type of processing carried out in WM. The more adverse the listening conditions, the less spare capacity we have to encode information into LTM. The brain mechanisms that either facilitate or hinder smooth "online" (i.e., real-time) language processes or long-term cognitive change are vital to this area of study.

Cognitive hearing science is not just about auditory aspects of speech but also relates to lip reading and to visual language, such as sign language. It also includes cross-cultural comparisons of tests and tools that address the mechanisms involved in auditory perception. For example, the WM tests used are now tested and evaluated in many labs all over the world (see the Frontiers Topic on " The role of working memory and executive function in communication under adverse conditions," eds. Rudner & Signoret, and the Topic on " Cognitive hearing mechanisms of language understanding: Short- and long-term perspectives," eds. Rönnberg, Ellis, Sörqvist, & Zekveld).

New Findings and Predictions

Many kinds of signal processing and signal distortion in hearing instruments (e.g., amplitude/frequency compression, binary masking) affect phonological processing, thus also affecting RAMBPHO. If the RAMBPHO representation is less precise, then the person has a heightened chance of accessing incorrect or irrelevant information from the mental lexicon, according to the ELU model. For some people with low WMC, a hearing aid actually can hinder rather than facilitate speech processing. At the same time, more advanced signal processing can benefit people with high WMC.

This pattern was demonstrated in a 2007 study in which cognitive hearing scientists Thomas Lunner and Elisabet Sundewall Thorén gave 23 hearing aid users a task to measure their WMC and then presented the participants with speech in background noise that made the speech difficult to hear (Lunner & Sundewall Thorén, 2007). Critically, some participants wore hearing aids offering basic signal processing (called automatic volume control), whereas others wore hearing aids providing more advanced signal processing (wide dynamic range compression). Participants with low WMC showed better comprehension with basic signal processing, whereas those with high WMC heard better with the more advanced signal processing (see also Arehart, Souza, Baca, & Kates, 2013).

Beyond hearing aids, high WMC also benefits other aspects of language processing: Participants with hearing impairments and high WMC are more efficient in their use of phonological codes in WM while carrying out rhyme and reading tasks than are those with low WMC, for example. High WMC also shields the auditory system from distraction, thus supporting the attention process. Furthermore, high WMC is linked with the ability to make use of semantic cues that help separate speech from background noise, and it also may serve as an important cognitive shield against fatigue.

Low WMC, on the other hand, is associated with high activation in the prefrontal brain regions related to semantic processing when understanding speech amid surrounding noise. These frontal brain processes cause mental strain.

The ELU model also makes predictions about the effects of hearing impairments on LTM. Compared with people with normal hearing function, people with impairments are more likely to miss certain auditory cues during the course of the day, even if they're using hearing aids. For instance, some
everyday adverse listening conditions (e.g., multitalker babble) can confound a person with hearing problems because the hearing aid cannot segregate streams of speech in the same way that a healthy auditory system can.

In these cases, a person's WM becomes fully occupied, attempting to resolve misinterpretations and misunderstandings. But because of an increased number of mismatches, episodic LTM will not be used (i.e., encoded into and retrieved from) with the same frequency.

We have demonstrated empirically that the LTM of people with hearing impairments falls into relative disuse and decline compared with their WM. In one study (Rönnberg et al., 2011), 160 hearing aid users were measured on their ability to recall words, action phrases, and sentences from LTM. Those with greater amounts of hearing loss performed worse on these tasks, even when age was taken into account. No such pattern was found for WM.

The results of Rönnberg et al. (2011) were reinforced in a study by Rönnberg, Hygge, Keidser, and Rudner (2014) involving more than 100,000 participants recruited through the UK Biobank (http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/). The UK Biobank is a research population and charity organization containing health data on 500,000 people. Interested researchers can apply to use this resource for health-related research relating to the public good. Interesting to note is that the negative effects of functional hearing loss strike at a visuospatial prospective LTM task (the proxy for episodic LTM in Rönnberg et al., 2014), hence aligning with the modality-general episodic LTM effects obtained in the Rönnberg et al. (2011) study. This leads to the more general conclusion that potential audibility or attention problems related to the hearing impairment and to an auditory task (encoded with the hearing aid) cannot explain the data obtained. Instead, it seems to be a more general, multimodal episodic memory system that is affected by hearing loss.

This episodic LTM decline, related to hearing loss, may be a cause of dementia. Recent research has shown that the risk of developing dementia of the Alzheimer's type during a 10-year period of follow-up studies increased by a factor of 4 to 5 for people with moderate to severe hearing impairments. This remained a significant finding even though many background variables such as age, sex, race, education, diabetes mellitus, smoking, and hypertension were taken into account. Because an episodic LTM deficit is an important component of developing Alzheimer's disease, this may be an important link that previously has been overlooked.

New Applications

Hearing aid manufacturers and dispensers must be made aware of the fact that only people with a high WMC will benefit from more advanced signal processing, and that the fitting of hearing aids should be based on more than the person's auditory perception of speech. As has been shown, for some people with low WMC, signal processing that is too advanced impedes rather than helps cognitive processing of the signal. It is, in this context, important for scientists to develop reliable brain indices of cognitive disturbance and effort, which may improve hearing aid fitting. Pupil-dilation and brain-oscillation measures are examples of these indices. Hopefully, future cognitive hearing aids can capitalize on such techniques - for example, by using the electrical signals detected in the brain to actually control the online amplification and signal processing in hearing aids.

From the new cognitive hearing science perspective, it would be equally important to evaluate episodic LTM of the contents of a conversation in noise, because these contents signal what kind of spare cognitive capacity the listener had while attempting to follow the conversation. If the communication saps too many processing resources from the listener's brain, that person will be left with fewer cognitive reserves to encode the information into episodic LTM.

Future studies also should evaluate the effects of WM training and, especially, whether any improvements in WMC transfer to other skills, such as speech understanding in noise tasks. Scientists also can use longitudinal studies to examine the effects of WMC training and hearing aid use, as well as how these effects relate to or shield the brain from age-related cognitive decline. All of these applications are important for clinical audiologists, psychologists, and other hearing health-care practitioners to know about in order to optimize the communication potential of people with hearing loss. œ

References

Arehart, K. H., Souza, P., Baca, R., & Kates, J. M. (2013). Working memory, age, and hearing loss: Susceptibility to hearing aid distortion. Ear and Hearing, 34, 251-260. doi:10.1097/AUD.0b013e318271aa5e

Arlinger, S., Lunner, T., Lyxell, B., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2009). The emergence of cognitive hearing science. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 50, 371-384. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9450.2009.00753.x

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Hearing With Your Ears, Listening With Your Brain

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Imagine yourself at a reception, chatting one on one with another guest. You struggle to hear everything the person is saying amid the din of surrounding conversation, but even though you miss a word here and there, you have enough context to understand the gist of what the person is telling you.

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This article has information on the effects of hearing and its link to deciphering emotion. Being able to pick up on the different tones or pitches of a person’s conversation is as important as seeing the emotions on the face. It helps with social interactions by knowing when and how to approach someone. One can choose to avoid situations that may negatively effect them. For example, hearing an argument between two people, in close proximity, escalating to screaming and yelling, would prompt a listener to exit the area to avoid any possible physical confrontation by being too close.

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Welcome back! The past blog posts have focused on the general role of our senses and our emotions, and the specific role of our visual system in emotion. This post's focus will be on the auditory system. Let's start with an exercise.

Listen to this: . Do you feel anxious? Alert? Nervous? What about this:? Do you feel peaceful, relaxed, and at ease? Our auditory system can trigger different emotions. This blog post will explore the ways our auditory system can aid us in emotional recognition and processing. It will also examine how deafness affects emotions.

One of the main ways which we interact with other people is through speech. When we speak, we often times display emotions in our words or voices. Someone's words may become clipped and loud in anger, or may seem to wobble when they're sad. A study by Grandjean et al. (2005) examined how these vocal differences affect the brain. Participants listened to angry and neutral words or just neutral words. They also listened to sounds of similar frequencies or amplitudes as controls. Participants who listened to the angry words had an increased activation in their right superior temporal sulcus (STS) of the auditory cortex. A study by Ethofer et al. (2006) supplemented these findings. Participants listened to words spoken in either angry, neutral, or happy tones. They rated the intensity of each word while in an fMRI. They too found increased activation for angry words in both sides of the STS, but stronger activation on the right. Interestingly, this activation was found even though participants were just rating intensity. These findings tell us that the auditory cortex is very involved in identifying voices as bearing some emotion. This identifying of emotion may take place in conjunction with just hearing and deciphering the words. It also may be done regardless of what else is being focused on (Ethofer et al., 2006). This makes sense, it is a good thing to understand the emotions of a person you are communicating with. Sometimes, the person may not directly tell you. Other times, it may be useful to help empathize with them. Brain activation in terms of emotions can change based upon the emotion in question.

Buchanan et. al (2000) found that increased STS activity varies based upon emotions. Participants listened to words that were said angrily, happily, neutrally, or sadly while in an fMRI scanner. They pressed a button when they heard a target word was heard or a word was spoken in a target emotion. Participants were more successful in emotional identification. In addition, greater right anterior auditory cortex activation was seen in the emotional tasks. This may indicate that our auditory systems process emotions before content (the actual word). Further, the right anterior middle frontal gyrus had more activation for sad words. This shows that sad intonations may alert us more than happy ones. This may be due to the fact that when someone is sad, we may be more in tune to them. Think about it. You are more likely to help and want to alter a sad person's state (back to at least neutral) than change a happy person's mood. How does this change for those who have impaired hearing? Research shows that emotional processing changes dramatically for the deaf.

Ludlow et al. (2010) aimed to see how emotional processing is impacted for deaf children. Deaf children and normal hearing children participated in their study. Participants viewed faces and categorized the emotions displayed. Faces were either human, a human like cartoon, or a cartoon. These faces were oriented upright or upside down. Both groups were equal on the two cartoon faces, and both groups performed worse on the upside down faces. Deaf participants, however, made more errors overall and had significantly worse performance. A study by Dyck et al. (2004) compared the emotional recognition abilities of hearing impaired and normal hearing children. He used four tests including: "Fluid Emotions Test" which looks at one's accuracy in classifying changing emotions and "Emotion Vocabulary Test " which looks at ability to define and describe emotional words. In all five tests, hearing impaired children performed worse. This implies that substantial emotional learning comes from what we hear. It allows us not only to process the emotions in someone's voice, but also how we utilize and apply knowledge to emotions.

It just makes sense that our sense of hearing (pun intended) underlies so much of our learning in emotion. Hearing is one of the first senses we really grasp. Babies are said to be in tune to the voices from early on. Hearing allows us to take in information about the world before anything else. You sometimes hear aspects of a situation before you arrive at the scene. As seen in this post, our auditory cortex increases in response to emotional tones. Those who are deaf have severely impacted emotional understanding. Being able to understand emotions from hearing, is especially important now where conversations may take place without any direct contact such as via phone. Next post, we will look at how our gustatory and olfactory systems can play into our emotion. Stay tuned!
References
Buchanan, T. W., Lutz, K., Mirzazade, S., Specht, K., Shah, N. J., Zilles, K., & Jäncke, L. (2000). Recognition of emotional prosody and verbal components of spoken language: an fMRI study. Cognitive Brain Research, 9(3), 227-238.

Dyck, M. J., Farrugia, C., Shochet, I. M., & Holmes‐Brown, M. (2004). Emotion recognition/understanding ability in hearing or vision‐impaired children: do sounds, sights, or words make the difference?. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45(4), 789-800.

Ethofer, T., Anders, S., Wiethoff, S., Erb, M., Herbert, C., Saur, R., ... & Wildgruber, D. (2006). Effects of prosodic emotional intensity on activation of associative auditory cortex. Neuroreport, 17(3), 249-253.

Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M. L., Scherer, K. R., & Vuilleumier, P. (2005). The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature neuroscience, 8(2), 145-146.

Ludlow, A., Heaton, P., Rosset, D., Hills, P., & Deruelle, C. (2010). Emotion recognition in children with profound and severe deafness: Do they have a deficit in perceptual processing?. Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 32(9), 923-928.

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Welcome back! The past blog posts have focused on the general role of our senses and our emotions, and the specific role of our visual system in emotion. This post's focus will be on the auditory system. Let's start with an exercise. Listen to this: . Do you feel anxious?