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If you could wave a magic wand, and change anything about the hearing care industry,
anything, what would it be? When I ask hearing care professionals this
question, the answer I get over and over again comes from their biggest frustration: the
performance of hearing aids in noise. Their magic wand would be used first to improve
the performance of hearing aids in noise. Amazingly enough, the magic wand exists, right
now. But few professionals use it. The magic wand is brain training.
Our brain is what keeps us from hearing better in noise, even with the best hearing aids.
But doing the right kind of brain training exercises can lead to better hearing in noise.
Let's see how that works. First we need to take a closer look at hearing
in noise. As we all know, hearing in noise is difficult
for people with hearing loss. Hearing loss is an obstacle to communicating in noisy situations.
As we also know, hearing aids can restore audibility and maximize understanding in noise,
better than ever before. But there’s missing piece to this puzzle.
There’s a second obstacle to communicating in noise. Its the aging process.
Psychologists at the University of Geneva looked at older adults and how they communicate.
They found there are three key factors that affect the ability to understand as we get
older: distractions, processing speed, and working memory.
It turns out that as part of normal, healthy aging, everyone is negatively affected in
the areas of distractibility, processing speed and working memory. When the conversation
gets challenging, chances are, it's because one of these three factors is affected.
We know that background noise is a huge distracter. As we get older, we have more difficulty hearing
in noise. Even people with normal hearing. I emphasize even people with normal hearing
because people think that hearing aids will solve all their problems with hearing well
in noise. But if people with normal hearing are distracted
by noise, there must be something beyond hearing loss that makes hearing in noise difficult.
That something is: the changes in the brain as we age.
As we get older, our processing speed slows down. When we have trouble hearing, we have
to fill in the gaps. But the conversation doesn’t stop while we are doing this. So
now we have to catch up. The faster we process what’s coming in, the more we can keep up
with the conversation. A slowdown in processing speed affects working
memory. To remember something, we must hear it clearly. A memory can only be as clear
as its original signal. As a result, hearing loss affects what gets stored in memory. And
linking back to distractions, the more background noise there is, the more working memory capacity goes
down. Now that we’ve talked about brain changes
that come with normal, healthy aging, let's look at how brain exercises, or more specifically,
how auditory training help us to hear better in noise.
LACE auditory training focuses on improving processing speed, working memory and ability
to understand speech in noise. We can actually reverse the effects of aging.
With LACE, as processing speed improves, our understanding improves. When we stop to fill
in the gaps created by hearing loss, our ability to catch up in the conversation gets better
with improved processing speed. The work on processing speed improves working
memory too. And LACE also directly targets working memory with auditory memory exercises.
This two pronged approach to improving working memory is important. Research shows that people
with a greater working memory capacity are able to understand more when they’re in
background noise. A third benefit of LACE training is that we
become less distracted by background noise, again through exercises targeted directly
at understanding speech in noise and improving working memory. The average LACE user shows
a QuickSIN improvement of 4.5 dB. Let's review in a nutshell what we've covered.
We have two major obstacles to understanding: hearing loss and changes in the brain that
happen as we age. LACE training, combined with hearing aids, allows us to overcome
these obstacles. With LACE training, our processing speed improves.
When processing speed improves, working memory capacity goes up.
When working memory capacity goes up, we hear better in noise.
We also hear better in noise by directly targeting speech understanding in noise.
Hearing aids plus LACE training means we hear better in noise.