But how do you know if it’s selective hearing or a legitimate hearing problem? Here’s what you need to know:

What is it?

Selective hearing has a variety of ways to affect the quality of your hearing, and can be both positive and negative depending on the situation. The most common reference to selective hearing implies that the person in question is hearing only what they want to hear, instead of what the communicator is actually saying. Or, they may hear what is said but change it to suit what is currently going on in their brain. Finally, selective hearing can simply mean extracting what is said out of high levels of background noise.

It was first named the “cocktail party effect” by scientist Colin Cherry in the 1950s, and has been getting people in trouble ever since.

Who has it?

Anyone can have selective hearing: a Wall Street worker trying to communicate over the phone in a noisy office exercises it to hear the recipient, while little Timmy may subconsciously choose not to hear his mother tell him about putting down the toys and going to the bath. This may also explain why your spouse doesn’t hear you correctly, too: if you told them to wash the dishes and they gave the dog a bath instead, it may just mean that the pooch was on his mind when you were speaking to him.

Women, too, may have it, although there are significantly more information regarding men and children. Assuming it is just selective hearing and not a hearing problem, however, there are ways to correct the irritating gesture.

Selective Hearing

• For children: If you want to capture a child’s attention, be silly: play a game, make a craft, or even a few funny faces can pull down any communication barriers and capture their attention. Often, children are developing their listening skill and may not have any actual hearing problem: games that require listening or even separating them from their distractions to get their full attention may cause the selective hearing to cease.

Smaller children, up until age three, may be distributing signs of a hearing or attention problem if they are not responding to your voice. When in doubt, it’s always best to consult a medical professional to have their hearing tested before making any assumptions.

• For men: If your spouse is having trouble tuning in to you—and only you—when you have something important to say, there are a few things to try. First, wait until you know you have his full attention. If it’s unimportant, wait until the game goes to a commercial break, or he decides it’s time to exchange the game controls for snacks. If it can’t wait, ask him to pause in his activities and give you his attention—it’ll be worth his while. If he’s still unresponsive, it’s worth having a serious conversation about, but keep in mind: selective hearing isn’t the only hearing disorder harming relationships…

Studies have shown that people who suffer from a hearing problem may also be harming their relationship with their spouse. Most suffering from hearing loss, especially in the early stages, may be in denial about the significance of their loss. This may lead to a refusal to get help, and only hurt the relationship as the spouse tends to believe it may be done purposefully. In the study, the majority of respondents believed their spouse suffered from selective hearing instead of a hearing loss problem.

But how do you know? Some of the most common signs of hearing problems include:

• Muffled or mumbled speech
• Difficulty understanding words, especially in loud environments
• Any recent procedure or head injury where temporary hearing loss was a risk
• Newborn babies should startle or jump when exposed to sudden loud noises
• By six months, children should turn their eyes or head towards a sound and recognize a parent’s voice
• By one year, a child should be able to imitate a few words or sounds

While following up your chore request with, “Honey, would you like a beer?” may be a tempting way to test your spouse’s hearing, it isn’t the only way. Of course, consulting a professional and undergoing routine hearing exams are the only safe way to distinguish between selective hearing and a legitimate problem. For more information, or to schedule your hearing test, contact us today!

We have compiled an infographic with information on the loudest everyday noises, those with the biggest potential to cause hearing damage. Sound pressure levels are measured in a unit called the Decibel, or dB. The human ear begins to sense pain at about 120 decibels. Most rock concerts average about 105-110 decibels and higher. Hearing protection in the form of earplugs and ear covers are a necessity for protecting your hearing while exposed to loud noise.

More information about hearing loss can be found at http://www.hearagainok.com/hearing-loss/

Hearing Loss Infographic by www.hearagainok.com

Although age-related hearing loss, otherwise known as presbycusis, cannot be stopped, there are tips to reduce the risk of hearing loss. Protecting the inner ear from suffering irreversible damage isn’t hard, although it does require more effort than simply getting better earphones. Prevention is the key to saving your ears, so here’s the skinny:

Two Kinds of Hearing Loss

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, sensorineural and conductive hearing loss is the two main types of hearing loss. Conductive hearing loss, which involves the inability of sound waves to reach the eardrum and middle ear ossicles, is usually temporary and can be corrected by surgery or medication. Fluid build-up caused by colds, allergies, and ear infections also provoke conductive hearing loss, with eardrum perforation, excessive earwax and benign tumors representing secondary causes.

Sensorineural hearing loss is more serious and concerns inner ear damage to the cochlea or nerve pathways extending from the brain into the middle ear. The ASLH states that this is the most common form of hearing loss and usually cannot be corrected by surgery or medication. Causes include aging, long-term exposure to loud noises, head trauma, severe illness and inherited deafness. Sensorineural hearing loss occurs when microscopic hair cells are bent or broken by extremely loud sound waves. Once a certain amount of hair cells are destroyed, a permanent type of hearing loss ensues because the ear can no longer convert sound waves into neural signals that the brain is responsible for interpreting.

Things You Can Do to Protect Your Hearing

The longer your ears are exposed to loud noises, the greater the risk you take of experiencing future hearing loss. If you must be around excessively loud noises for more than a few minutes, wear some kind of ear protection (earplugs or earmuffs, for example) until noise levels decrease. Even cotton balls stuffed in your ears will reduce the impact of powerful sound waves.

The National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders  reports that continued exposure to sounds above 85 decibels can cause gradual hearing loss. To put that in perspective, lawn mowers emit around 90 decibels, while chainsaws weigh in with 110 decibels. When your ears are subjected to more than one minute of sounds at or above 110 decibels, the NIDCD states that you risk losing some, if not all, of your hearing permanently.

If you regularly use headphones, choose noise-cancelling headphones that block all external noises when listening to music. This allows you to keep your music at a lower volume without compromising the sound quality, and will deter any habits of constantly cranking the volume.

If you were inadvertently exposed to loud sounds without the proper ear protection, you can “detoxify” your ears by undergoing a quiet “recovery” period. According to the United Kingdom-based Deafness Research Organization, you can reduce the risk of suffering permanent hearing loss by allowing hair cells with minor damage to recover in a quiet environment. Additionally, this explains why you seem to “hear” better after removing earplugs that have blocked all incoming noises for a while.

Finally, doctors are the best medicine: periodic check-ups can significantly help you protect your hearing. Detecting inner ear problems in advance, following avoiding exposure to extreme decibels, is the best preventative measure you can take to protect your hearing. Moreover, hearing loss doctors often find that patients suffering from a middle-ear infection are not even aware of it, especially young children, although adults can also have an ear infection without feeling ill or feverish.

Don’t wait until you feel ill or can no longer hear your television to seek help; if you feel you may be suffering from impaired hearing (or just want a check-up), consult your doctor today!

What is Tinnitus?

Imagine getting to listen to music all the time. If you’re a big music fan, that can almost sound like a treat. But what if you were hearing a not-so-musical sound, constantly, without any choice of whether or not listen? Welcome to the world of a person with tinnitus.

Most commonly, tinnitus is known as ringing in the ear, but really it is much more than that. For some people, it’s a clicking or chirping noise. It could also sound like buzzing or even roaring.

Medically speaking, the sound a person hears when he or she has tinnitus is actually the perception of sound — because there is no actual external noise. To the person who has tinnitus, though, the sound is both real and disconcerting.

The severity of tinnitus has a wide range. At some time or another, most people experience a bit of sound that no one else hears. In most cases, this passes relatively quickly, and things return to normal. For more severe cases of tinnitus, the condition is identified most often in white people and in people who live in the southern portion of the U.S. Among the highest instances are men between the ages of 65 and 74, who, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), suffer from the condition nearly 12% of the time.

What causes tinnitus?

So does a case of tinnitus mean impending hearing loss? It can, but that isn’t always the case. Tinnitus can be a side effect of many different conditions including pregnancy, thyroid issues, anemia, jaw misalignment, or use of aspirin or some antibiotics. In rare cases, it can be a sign of a brain tumor.

Most of the time, a person’s hearing ability does play a large role in the cause of his or her tinnitus. Hearing loss-related tinnitus can happen as part of the aging process, through trauma to the ear due to drug use or chemicals, or – most likely – noise. When this type of trauma is present, the cochlea – the hearing part of the ear – suffers damage.

Many believe that tinnitus occurs in these cases because the cochlea fails to transfer normal signals to the brain, and the brain compensates by making its own noise. People who have milder cases of tinnitus have an intensified experience during times when their hearing is compromised, such as when they have an ear infection or even if they have extra wax buildup in their ears.

How is tinnitus treated?

If tinnitus is something that only happens to you once in a while, chances are you will just grin (or grimace) and bear it. If the condition is especially bothersome, or seems to come out of nowhere, it is best to have your doctor take a look. You don’t want to ignore a problem that could point to some other medical issue. Also, note that when only one ear is affected, there is a greater chance that something more serious is wrong.

If you and your doctor confirm that there is not an underlying cause other than hearing loss, most doctors will simply tell their patients that the condition is not serious. And sometimes, you might want a bit more help.

Even within the medical community, tinnitus is still not completely understood. There is currently no known cure, but some treatments have emerged that might prove effective for some people. And correcting the hearing problem can often correct (or at least reduce) the tinnitus. Many people do find relief when they wear a hearing aid or get cochlear implants.

Sound therapies that use white noise to mask the sounds created by the tinnitus have been helpful for many people who experience it. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment that stimulates electric activity in the brain, is also something that is being explored for those with tinnitus.

Some look to alternative medicine for their treatment options. Some methods include taking herbal supplements, vitamins, or minerals such as zinc or magnesium to help relieve symptoms. Others include hypnosis or acupuncture. These treatments can be controversial, and while they are usually not endorsed by those in traditional medicine, you should consult with your doctor to make sure any treatment you try is not harmful.

Hereditary hearing loss is caused by a gene mutation that is passed down from parent to child. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) explains that if each parent has a copy of the gene with a mutation, they can have a child with hearing loss even if both parents can hear. In fact, most babies with hearing loss are born to parents who can hear.

A conductive defect, like an ear canal blockage or bone malformation, occurs in the outer or middle ear. However, if the cause is located in the inner ear, such as a problem with the cochlear nerve, it is referred to as a sensorineural defect.

Syndromic vs. Nonsyndromic Hearing Loss

Hearing loss can be classified as either syndromic or nonsyndromic. Syndromic hearing loss simply means that a person has other symptoms besides hearing loss, such as blindness, facial birth defects or skeletal dysplasia. This might indicate that the person suffers from some type of broader health problem. There are many different health issues that could include hearing loss as one of their symptoms. As you can likely guess, then, nonsyndromic hearing loss displays no other symptoms besides the hearing loss itself.

Hereditary Hearing Loss Symptoms

Persons with hereditary hearing loss might show some symptoms, such as delayed speech, in early childhood. According to Dr. David Perstein, some parents start to suspect that their child cannot hear normally because the child does not consistently respond to his or her name or asks for words to be repeated. Another sign can be that the child does not seem to react to loud noises.

Paul Johnson of The Gale Group explains that the typical age of onset for Dominant Progressive Hearing Loss (DPHL) is early childhood, but in some families it does not show symptoms until early or middle adulthood. Signs of DPHL in an adult include asking others to repeat things, watching other people’s mouths while they are speaking or turning up the volume on the television so loudly that others might complain. Some individuals affected with DPHL also might experience problems with balance.

When hearing issues are suspected, doctors could begin by looking at a person’s physical features, medical history and family history. Based on this, they can begin to classify the hearing loss, which often points to specific causes. Doctors might need to order additional specific tests in order to diagnose syndromes associated with hearing loss in some cases. Common types of hearing screening include otoaoustic emissions, pure-tone air conduction, speech reception threshold, middle ear tests and auditory brainstem response tests.

Are There Treatment Options?

Dr. Kathleen Arnos of the Medical College of Virginia’s Human Genetics Department suggests that some forms of genetic deafness are preventable or treatable. She states that hearing loss may be preventable for some people by avoiding the use of drugs such as streptomycin, and that hearing loss associated with untreated biotinidase deficiency may be completely preventable through the early recognition and treatment of infants with large doses of biotin.

Other individuals with hearing loss might benefit from surgery to correct ear malformations, and some choose to have cochlear implants. According to the National Institute on Deafness, approximately 188,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants. In the United States, roughly 41,500 adults and 25,500 children have received them.

For individuals for whom hearing loss cannot be prevented or corrected, hearing aids, speech therapy and sign language are the standard courses of action. The deaf community provides strong support to those suffering from hearing loss, and most people live productive, fulfilling lives in spite of this disability.

In short, a balance disorder is a condition that makes a person feel unsteady or dizzy, with feelings that range from moving to spinning to floating, despite the fact that they are standing still or lying down.

Not only is this sensation frightening or emotionally uncomfortable and distracting, it can lead to physical injuries when trying to move – tripping and falling, for example, or dropping heavy or breakable objects. The balance disorder root causes are often attributed to certain specific health conditions, medications the person is currently taking, or problems that are more significantly associated with the inner ear.

What Causes Balance Disorder?

While you can change your medications and manage other health conditions through different forms of treatment, problems with the inner ear must be dealt with in their own specific way. This balance disorder root cause is one that can only be resolved by first understanding how the inner ear itself works, as it is actually the control room when it comes to our sense of balance.

Known as the labyrinth, a maze-like structure of soft tissue and small bones lead through small canals to the otolithic organs, which help us maintain our balance. At the opposite end of these canals is the cochlea, which allows us to hear, and completes what is known as the vestibular system. This amazing and complex system tells the body when it is moving in a straight line or when it is slightly or greatly off kilter. However, like many systems within the human body, the smallest problems can throw everything off.

A balance disorder may be caused by viral or bacterial infections in the vestibular system. Balance disorders can also be caused by a head injury or a blood circulation disorder that affects the inner ear or brain.

Symptoms of a true balance disorder – not just a spell of dizziness that may be due to some sort of illness – include:

-          repeated feelings of vertigo (also known as a spinning sensation)

-          falling or feeling like you are going to fall

-          lightheadedness or a floating sensation

-          blurred vision

-          regular confusion or disorientation.

If these symptoms occur regularly over more than a week of time, you’ll want to consult a physician to see if you have a balance disorder and try to narrow down what may be causing it.

However, diagnosing a balance disorder can often prove difficult for doctors, as they will have to make sure there is actually something wrong with the vestibular system and that your symptoms are not caused by other factors. Once it is confirmed, and the specific type of balance disorder is diagnosed, there are a variety of different treatments.

Balance Disorder Treatment Options

For one known as BPPV, a doctor may prescribe a series of simple movements meant to dislodge the otoconia from the semicircular canal in your inner ear, which is the cause of your vertigo. This entails sitting upright and then laying down and turning your head to each side for a few minutes at a time. This may need to be done a number of times to cure the balance disorder.

Other balance disorders like Meniere’s disease may require that you change your diet to relieve or cure it. Reducing the amount of salt you eat or cutting out alcohol and caffeine may cure it, and you might need to quit smoking. In severe cases of Meniere’s disease, surgery on the inner ear is also an option to relieve the symptoms.

In very serious balance disorder cases, medications may be injected into the inner ear to relieve the sense of dizziness and vertigo. However, these injections can lead to the loss of hearing in the sensitive cells in your inner ear.

If You’re Feeling Topsy-Turvy, See Your Physician

If you are having dizziness or vertigo or any of the other symptoms mentioned above, wait a few days and see if they persist. If they do, you should see your doctor to be sure you don’t have a balance disorder.