Understanding Binaural Hearing Impairment: Causes and Treatments
Binaural hearing is an important and sometimes underestimated aspect of our ears and hearing. When you use both ears for hearing, you give your brain additional auditory information to process. Better speech recognition occurs in noisy situations, and you can detect sound sources (directionality) through this mechanism.
What is Binaural Hearing?
Binaural hearing refers to the way our brain processes sounds received from both ears to create a comprehensive auditory experience. Your right ear transmits sounds to your left brain region before your left ear sends signals to your right brain region. Your brain processes sounds from both sides before the entire brain creates a unified interpretation of the heard information.
As far as we know, our hearing pinpoints sound in a similar way to that in which GPS satellites pinpoint users, by using the relative time delay between received signals. For example, a sound off at a right angle to the head can reach your nearest ear 0.6 milliseconds before it reaches the ear on the other side. We don’t just hear with our ears, but with our brains too.
In an evolutionary context, the benefits of being able to hear a sound and immediately pinpoint its location are obvious. Somewhere, far back in the past, enough of your ancestors used their keen binaural hearing to dodge predators that you’re here today to read this article. Binaural hearing also helps us communicate clearly! Sound entering each ear has been demonstrated to stimulate the opposite side of the brain.
The Impact of Binaural Hearing Loss
As you could probably guess, binaural hearing loss is a hearing loss that affects both ears. Unfortunately, due to the importance binaural hearing plays in our lives, even mild hearing loss in both ears can have negative effects. The severity, onset, and specific effects of binaural hearing loss vary from person to person. Some people are severely hearing-impaired in both ears, others only mildly. Some people have one ‘bad’ ear and another ‘good’ one.
Hearing speech is often particularly tricky for those with binaural hearing loss. As referenced above, it’s thought that the interplay between the two halves of the brain after receiving signals from both ears helps hearing and comprehension. Your ability to recognize words and understand speech, along with your capacity to focus on specific sounds or voices, improves through this process.
The majority of individuals with hearing loss face difficulties hearing in noisy environments. Binaural hearing enables individuals to hear more clearly by helping to pull what you want to hear out of background noise more successfully. Your brain uses this method to block out unnecessary noises when you need to listen to a distant voice during meals, at restaurants, or when speaking with family members. The brain's cooperative function enables selective listening.
Treatment Options for Binaural Hearing Loss
Patients with unilateral hearing loss come to Denver Audiology for evaluation of their hearing difficulties in one ear. The majority of cases involve hearing loss that affects both ears, although one ear shows greater deterioration. The condition where hearing deteriorates differently in one ear compared to the other affects numerous individuals. Patients often inquire as to whether they can limit their hearing aid treatment to their more severely damaged ear.
The mainstream idea of a hearing aid is a simple sound amplifier. Until quite recently, this really was the case, and many people still wear this kind of hearing aid. Older aids are tuned to mainly pick up sound in the direction in which the wearer is looking, which can sometimes make it difficult to get their attention from behind. Why would this present a problem? We now know that our ears are more complicated than this.
Nowadays, smarter binaural aids or CROS hearing aids come in a radio-linked pair, creating a convincing imitation of natural hearing and stimulating our brain’s auditory centers. When hearing aids are correctly fitted to both ears, your brain achieves better sound processing accuracy. Using two hearing aids requires adjusting the volume down for each device.
The BAHA (Bone-Anchored Hearing Aid) serves as a bone-conduction device that patients can use. A CROS system (Contralateral Routing of Signal) functions by using a microphone on the deaf side to transmit sound wirelessly to a hearing aid placed in the better ear.
Think about a pair of glasses. With two bad eyes you’d much rather wear a pair of glasses than a monocle, or two monocles together.
Every person has different hearing loss needs, which require individualized solutions. We encourage you to schedule a hearing evaluation to determine your hearing needs.
Benefits of Binaural Hearing
Here's a summary of the benefits of using both ears for hearing:
- Improved speech recognition, especially in noisy environments.
- Enhanced ability to detect the direction of sound.
- Better sound processing accuracy by the brain.
- Improved focus on specific sounds or voices.
To illustrate the advantages of binaural hearing, consider the following table:
| Feature | Binaural Hearing | Monaural Hearing |
|---|---|---|
| Speech Recognition in Noise | Significantly Improved | Limited Improvement |
| Sound Localization | Accurate | Difficult |
| Sound Quality | Natural and Balanced | Less Natural |
| Listening Effort | Reduced | Increased |
Are you ready to achieve optimal hearing with both ears?