We are all suffering the pressures of a modern world. Our senses are being bombarded. Add to that the need to respond to many different stimuli simultaneously. Research shows that our brains have an incredible ability to manage and deal with many complex tasks. But if we live with an untreated sensory deficit like hearing loss, this may be doing us harm by putting extra stress on the brain.
So what does that mean in practice?
When you are struggling to hear, you are using lots of brain power to understand what is being said. If you are missing words or sounds, your brain is working hard to analyse the context, watch body language, read lips and make sense of visual cues.
As soon as you put all this brain power into following a conversation, you’re using up valuable resources that is needed for other important functions like memory. Research in recent years has found a strong link between hearing loss, dementia and age-related memory loss.
In 2015, Dr Frank Lin from John Hopkins University published the results of a longitudinal study of people with hearing loss. He had been tracking brain changes over 10 years. He found those people whose hearing was impaired at the beginning of the study experienced brain atrophy (shrinkage) faster than people without hearing loss.
Dr Lin said “If you want to address hearing loss well.. (you must) do it sooner rather than later… you want to treat it before these brain structural changes take place.”
So at Hear-Clear, we are very keen to help you reduce the strain on your brain. Time is precious. Make an appointment to talk to our friendly staff about how you can take care of your hearing and your brain resources.
