Back in the mid-80’s I had my hearing tested as part of a job, and got roundly chastized by the hearing lady about the damage that listening to music through headphones had done to my high-end hearing. I pretty much quit using headphones at that point, but had always assumed that this would be a on-going issue for me (since once you kill those little hairs, they don’t ever come back).
Yesterday I had my hearing tested for the first time (I think) since the test nearly 20 years ago, and I was all prepared to learn that the situation was deteriorating slowly as I drift through middle age, etc., etc. Certainly the evidence at home and in movies and the like was that I was having trouble hearing things (especially people speaking) that other people could hear just fine.
Or not.
I was significantly above average for someone my age in all frequencies except the two highest, where I was about average at (I think) 4KHz and a bit below average at 8KHz. So the high-end damage is there (and never going to get better), but I’m well above average in the ranges of human speech.
Weird.
I’m not quite sure what this means, because that still doesn’t change the fact that I have to cup my ears to make out dialogue in films, or that I can’t hear/understand WeatherGirl when it seems that I should be. It’s easy enough to believe, though, that a simple test (and it was a simple) of whether or not you hear different frequencies in near silence test doesn’t necessarily tell us a ton about ability to parse complex speech in a noisy environment. I know that I was happily passing eye tests at elementary school when I was blind as a bat, which delayed me getting glasses by several years from when they probably should have been prescribed.
Or maybe it’s just a case of “I just can’t hear my parents call”.
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