{"id":21,"date":"2005-01-11T14:51:18","date_gmt":"2005-01-11T20:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/01\/11\/weirdly-enough-i-can-hear-really-well\/"},"modified":"2005-01-11T15:10:19","modified_gmt":"2005-01-11T21:10:19","slug":"weirdly-enough-i-can-hear-really-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/01\/11\/weirdly-enough-i-can-hear-really-well\/","title":{"rendered":"Weirdly enough, I can hear really well…"},"content":{"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 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>\nNo tag for this post.\n\t

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