Hearing health is brain health
Your ears collect sound, but it's your brain that makes sense of sound. Good hearing can help your brain stay fit throughout your life – which can have a positive impact on your overall health.
Your ears collect sound, but it's your brain that makes sense of sound. Good hearing can help your brain stay fit throughout your life – which can have a positive impact on your overall health.
Good hearing helps you communicate and makes it easier to participate in healthy physical activities like team sports.
Your hearing helps you meet new people and pursue new experiences that keep you mentally and socially active in the world.
Hearing well lets you feel at ease while listening because your brain uses less energy on understanding and guessing what people say1 - preserving more for what you feel like focusing on.
If you have hearing loss, your brain must spend more energy to make sense of sound. It also has an incomplete sound picture, so it uses more energy on filling in the blanks by guessing what people say. This means it has less energy left to remember, and less resources for other mental processes2,3. You become more tired by normal situations and conversations.
Giving your brain the full sound picture it needs to work naturally makes it easier and less tiring to focus on the sounds you want to pay attention to.
Unfortunately, having an unclear sound picture can be just the start. The increased effort needed to listen can lead to fatigue and a tendency to give up. This can result in missing out on dialogues and social interactions, leading to people withdrawing and becoming isolated. Ultimately, having a hearing loss can lead to poorer quality of life4.
Hearing in noise is one of the biggest challenges for people with hearing loss.5 It often leaves people feeling tired and disconnected. Fortunately, we know how to give you the right help based on your needs.
Helen Keller - deaf and blind activist
Ensuring you have the best hearing possible is a vital foundation for a healthy brain and a healthy lifestyle.
Reduce your listening stress
Dealing with loud noise and struggling to follow speech in noisy environments can cause listening stress6. Even short periods of stress can have a negative impact on our cognitive abilities, reducing our ability to engage in conversation7.
Ensure healthy relationships
Relationships with loved ones and friends are vital for our wellbeing and health, and they are much easier to develop and maintain with good hearing.
Enjoy a richer emotional life
Many of the emotions we feel arise from everyday sounds and conversations. Through our ears we are entertained, stimulated, amused and charmed. What’s more, natural sounds and music can relax us, lift our mood, stimulate us, and inspire us.
Stimulate your brain
Whenever you have a good talk with a friend, listen to music, or follow current events on the TV, all sorts of brain areas are stimulated – centres of the brain for emotions, language, memories and more.
Get a quick indication of whether you have hearing loss.
Find out what the newest hearing care technologies can do for you.
Explore how hearing loss affects children at each stage of life.
Reference
Edwards (2016). A Model of Auditory-Cognitive Processing and Relevance to Clinical Applicability.
Pichora-Fuller et al. (2016). Hearing impairment and cognitive energy: The framework for understanding effortful listening (FUEL).
Rönnberg et al. (2013). The Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model: theoretical, empirical, and clinical advances.
Amieva et al. (2018). Death, depression, disability, and dementia associated with self-reported hearing problems: a 25-year study.
Jorgensen and Novak (2020). Factors influencing hearing aid adoption.
Christensen et al. (2021). The everyday acoustic environment and its association with human heart rate: evidence from real-world data logging with hearing aids and wearables.
Qin et al (2009). Acute psychological stress reduces working memory-related activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.