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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Or not.<\/p>\n

I was significantly above<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Weird.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it’s just a case of “I just can’t hear my parents call”<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Weirdly enough, I can hear really well…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":805,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2008\/02\/27\/if-only-dickens-were-around-to-write-the-novel\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":0},"title":"If only Dickens were around to write the novel","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"27 Feb 08","format":false,"excerpt":"Photograph from Portfolio.com, courtesy of: Free Press From yesterday in Portfolio.com: How big are the stakes in the so-called network neutrality debate now raging before Congress and federal regulators? 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