Audiologist Answers Hearing Questions From Twitter

I'm audiologist Dr. Emily Taylor,

and I'll be answering your Twitter questions today.

This is Hearing Support.

[upbeat music]

All right, Lexamerwexa wants to know,

how do ears work?

Please send help.

This is a model of the ear.

Let's bring it here.

Right here you see the pinna,

this is the large part of your ear.

That is for funneling sound waves into your ear canal.

So when the sound wave enters your ear canal,

it's gonna make it down to your eardrum

which it's gonna vibrate your eardrum back and forth.

Behind the eardrum

it is an air filled chamber called your middle ear.

Right here are the three smallest bones

in your body called ossicles.

When the ear drum moves back and forth

it is moving the ossicular chain back and forth as well.

That chain actually amplifies the vibrations

and sends it into the inner ear

which you can see here

it's called your cochlea.

Inside the cochlea it is fluid filled

which is really important to know

which stimulates different hair cells

that are tonotopically organized

which means they all are responsible

for different frequencies.

And then from the hair cell

it's gonna send electrical signals up your auditory nerve

and send it to the brain

where we process sound and understand it.

Axtwentee is asking, ear infection?

What am I a child?

So yes, there is a higher incident rate

of ear infections among children,

but we do see them in adults as well.

The most common you would see is an outer ear infection

which right here on my little model,

there are a few different reasons

but it's typically from a buildup of bacteria in your ear.

Swimmer's ear is what they are commonly calling it

which is just when you've got

a lot of moist water in your ear canal

that just gets left there

and that's a breeding ground for bacteria.

So it is important to keep your ears dry,

just taking a towel to your ear and drying it off.

Also putting your ear down

letting the water run out naturally,

or putting your blow dryer on a very low setting

and just blowing it near your ear.

Withernseaswee.

What the [beep] is ear candling

and why would you pay for it?

Don't pay for it, it's a hoax.

This is a really dangerous thing

that's going around on the internet.

What it is is you're lighting a candle

coming out of your ear

which some people believe creates a vortex

which can suction out your ear wax.

At the end of that procedure

you look in the candle and people see stuff.

That's actually just parts of the candle that you're seeing,

that is not the actual debris coming out of your ear.

Some interesting videos to watch would be

when they put one in the ear

and then right next to it

they put one in a cup

and you see the same things inside of the candle.

Also, it does not get hot enough to actually create suction,

and you're lighting a fire by your head

so that to me just already sounds like a bad idea.

So don't waste your money on it, don't buy it,

and don't let your friends do it to you.

Next question is from JLRumhor,

is Apple's Conversation Boost

essentially making the AirPod a hearing aid?

If so, I'm sold on it.

Apple does have this Conversation Boost feature.

What it's doing is basically

giving you a directional microphone

so that you hear directly in front of you

and then trying to cut back on the sound around you.

Some of the reviews say it sounds a little unnatural

'cause you're actually not

sure how loud the background noise is.

Other people find it really helpful.

Definitely can make speech coming from in front of you

a lot clearer and louder.

If you find it helpful,

go ahead and use it, there's no downside to it.

Apple's Conversation Boost

is different from a hearing aid.

A hearing aid itself,

we would program it to your hearing loss

and just give you back the frequencies you are missing

where this does not take an account your hearing loss.

Nowadays some hearing aids

don't use the directional microphones anymore.

Hearing aids do have two microphones,

that is how we do better in background noise,

but it's not just pointing a signal right in front of you

because you wanna hear all around you

so that's a big distinction between the two.

Stimmyskye sent in the question,

how do hearing aids work?

I mean, if you have a drop in specific frequencies,

do they amplify specifically these frequencies

or just make everything louder?

That is such a good question.

A lot of times you'll see these really

inexpensive hearing aids advertised online.

Those are just amplifiers.

They are making everything louder,

but unfortunately loudness does not equal clarity.

So that is why a hearing aid is so much more sophisticated.

It's not just making things louder,

we're trying to make things sound clear and natural.

So a hearing aid has a few different parts to it.

This is an example of a hearing aid.

Some of the main components are in this back piece

which sit behind your ear.

In this tiny packaging there is a very sophisticated chip.

Some of the chips actually have what's called

a deep neural network

that has 20 million sound samples stored on it

so that when you hear a sound,

the hearing aid can actually put it on a map

and figure out what it is,

like a bird chipping or a tea kettle going off.

There's also microphones on board

which sends the signal to an amplifier

which then it's produced in the speaker

directly into your ear canal.

Some really cool things about hearing aids today is that

they are Bluetooth compatible

so you can stream audio from your cell phones

and different devices.

But a really important thing to remember is a hearing aid,

it's not canceling the background noise,

it's just trying to adjust the signal to noise ratio

so that what's important like the speech signal

is gonna come above the background noise

so that you can actually hear it

without having to work hard.

Question from Frnknstnmnstr.

What is the purpose of ear wax?

It does this world no good.

There are a few purposes to it,

it's actually quite important to have it.

First of all, we have glands in our ear canal.

They produce the ear wax.

Ear wax is antimicrobial

so it can prevent infections in your ear.

It can also hydrate the skin.

If you didn't have that,

your ear might be itchy or dry.

Another reason we have ear wax is to prevent debris

from getting all the way down to your eardrum.

So ear wax is really important to have.

People are always thinking it's like the enemy,

but we produce it on purpose

and your ear actually self clean.

Say that back to me,

it self cleans.

People are obsessed with putting things

in their ears right now.

You should not put anything in your ears to clean them.

I do recommend an at-home video otoscope.

These are about $35.

It connects to your smartphone,

it's super easy to use

and you just take it and look inside your ear

while looking on your smartphone

and you can clearly see if there is ear wax or not.

But sometimes these come

with little tools to get it out with.

I don't recommend using the tools.

There are safer ways to remove it at home

or you could go see a professional

like an ear, nose, and throat physician, or an audiologist.

BadLightskinm asked,

if q tips can damage your ear canal

or pushes the ear wax back,

how the [beep] are we supposed to clean our ears?

First of all, q tips, they are the enemy,

they are not helping us.

They even say on the box,

do not put in your ears.

Q tips what they're really doing

is just pushing any wax you have

deeper into the ear where it's much more sensitive

and it would make it a lot harder for me

to take it out of your ears.

I recommend not using any objects blindly in your ears.

The safest way to remove ear wax

would be to use wax softening drops,

Debrox is a popular brand,

and I recommend using it multiple times a day

for a few days in a row

and using warm water flushes in between,

this should be the most effective way.

But if you don't feel comfortable doing it at home,

or you've tried it for a few days and it is not working,

I do recommend seeing a professional

like an audiologist or an ear nose and throat physician.

BronalystSweetB writes, nephew,

What's a decibel?

My dad, A 10th of a bell obviously.

A decibel is a way to measure the intensity of a sound.

We can use it to measure loudness.

So with an audiogram,

that's a test showing how soft you can hear,

we can tell you what decibel level

you can hear at for each frequency.

This question is from maybe Maybemikki,

why would I wear earplugs to a concert?

I want Halsey to damage my ears.

I mean, don't we all?

But the truth is we need to be protecting our hearing.

Going to a concert could be dangerous

depending on the decibel level of the concert.

A recommendation I have is to download a decibel meter.

They are free on the App Store,

and then you can actually monitor how loud it is.

If you are listening to something 80 decibels,

you can only safely do that for eight hours.

But once you go all the way up to a hundred decibels,

you can only be there for 10 minutes

without possibly causing any sort of damage to your hearing.

And even going up to 110 decibels,

technically you can only be in that for safely one minute,

and concerts are well over a 100 decibels.

One of the biggest side effects from noise exposure

would be hearing loss as well as tinnitus.

Our inner ear has thousands of hair cells

and I'm not just talking about hair fibers,

these are sensory hair cells.

They can become weak or break and we cannot regenerate them.

So for example, acoustic trauma or repeated noise exposure,

they will affect those hair cells and cause damage to them

and we can't regenerate them

so it's really important that we protect them

'cause we have one shot at it.

All right, BFNoles is asking [beep] that hearing test

where you sit in a booth and listen to beeps.

The [beep] are they testing for?

My ability to hear my wife

when she says [beep] her breath? [laughs]

So, a hearing test consists of a lot of different parts.

The first part would be otoscopy

where we look in your ears and check for any debris,

lax, anything blocking the eardrum.

The next test would be tympanometry

where we move your eardrum back and forth

and we're checking the pressure in your ears,

the volume of your ear canal,

and how well your eardrum vibrates back and forth.

Now, what you are referring to is the beep test.

We are presenting different beeps at different frequencies

and we're trying to find the softest sound

that you can hear.

This is how we measure hearing loss.

I'd say the number one complaint people have

when they come into my office is that

they have trouble hearing in background noise,

this is a very common complaint.

Everybody has trouble hearing in background noise,

but what we do in the office is we measure,

it's a test called the Quick-SIN

and we can measure

what signal to noise ratio your brain needs

to understand well in background noise.

So the average listener who does well in background noise

only needs a zero to two decibel advantage

over the background noise.

Sometimes in the office we'll find that

some people have a 20 decibel signal to noise ratio meaning

let's say the background noise was at 60 decibels,

someone would have to speak to them at 80 decibels

so that much difference over the background noise

for them to understand clearly.

This question's from Bayouwilson.

I said, what causes tinnitus?

So, there are a few causes of tinnitus.

And first and foremost,

tinnitus is a sound that you are hearing

inside of your ear.

Nobody else can hear it around you.

So it can sound like a buzzing, a ringing.

Some people say it's like cicadas in your ear.

And some of the causes of tinnitus,

the first one would be noise exposure.

Some other causes of tinnitus are

infections as well as stress and anxiety and fatigue.

There are technically no treatments for tinnitus,

that's probably the number one question I get asked online.

My first question is, have you had a hearing test?

Because if you do have hearing loss,

hearing aids are an amazing way

to mask the sound of your tinnitus.

I have fit hearing aids on people

who have had tinnitus in their ears for 20 years

and they put the hearing aids on

and they said for the first time in decades

they have silence which is a really powerful thing.

The next question is from Emmaawarnerr,

how do our ears affect our balance?

A lot of people are unaware that our balance organ

is actually located in the inner ear.

That is what you see right here.

These are our semicircular canals,

they actually detect gravity and movement

and that's what keeps us upright and keeps us balanced.

Vertigo is when you experience a room spinning sensation.

There are a few different causes for that.

Ménière's disease is a disease that does have vertigo

accompanied with it.

Head trauma.

Sometimes we see positional vertigo,

which would mean if you turned your head in one direction,

that would bring on dizziness,

but if you turned your head the other way, no dizziness.

The dizziness that happens with movement,

what is happening there

is we have little calcium carbonate crystals

in our semicircular canals that are lodged

meaning they are stationary.

They can become dislodged,

and when they are free floating

it is hard to detect gravity

which will cause vertigo or room spinning dizziness.

There is a maneuver that I recommend

having a professional do,

don't look on YouTube and do it yourself,

definitely more effective

if you see a physical therapist

who specializes in vertigo

or an ear, nose, and throat physician,

or an audiologist that specializes in vestibular issues.

The next question is from Manny Edwards.

What is the highest frequency you can hear?

Not humans in general, but you?

In general humans have the ability to hear

from 20 hertz all the way up to 20,000 hertz.

It's hard to know how high I personally can hear

'cause your standard audio test only goes up to 8,000 hertz.

There are some high frequency testing at other facilities.

A common thing we see in the clinic

is hearing loss due to aging which is called presbycusis.

This typically looks

just like a high frequency hearing loss.

We all do tend to lose our high frequencies first,

that is the most common configuration of a hearing loss

that I'll see in the office.

And that's because how the ear is set up,

our cochlea is snail shaped

and the base sounds which are lower frequency,

they get less attention than the high frequency hair cells

so we do see damage to our hair cells

more so in the high frequencies.

We have a question from Kellyyyllek,

can my eardrum burst on a plane?

My right ear is blocked from sickness

and the plane pressure as we descend

is causing extremely sharp pain.

Yes, your eardrum can burst on a plane

especially when you're having a sinus infection

or a negative pressure in your ear.

The sudden change when you're in an airplane,

it's very fast,

which is why a lot of us feel popping,

that's actually your eustachian tube

trying to regulate atmospheric pressure

to the pressure behind your eardrum.

But in some rare cases,

it can actually burst your eardrum.

When the eardrum ruptures,

there is a hole in the eardrum

and most likely it will repair itself.

But in rare cases it does not

and an ENT can put a little piece,

it's almost like a piece of parchment paper

that they put on the eardrum

so that the skin develops over it

so that you have a full solid eardrum

to keep your middle ear safe.

So I recommend not traveling when you're too sick,

make sure you see an ear nose and throat physician

before you travel

and see if there's anything they can can do

to make you feel a little bit more comfortable on the plane.

MeerkatSceptre sent in a question asking,

I've lost my hearing so badly

that when my volume is jacked all the way up,

it sounds normal and not loud.

Can you regain hearing?

If this is the case,

I recommend you seeing an audiologist for a hearing test.

There are different kinds of hearing loss

that can be resolved through medication and surgery

and audiologists would be your first step

just to figure out what type of hearing loss it is.

And then we would refer out

to an ear, nose, and throat physician,

they prescribe medications and do the surgery.

AbbyBai19947277 asked,

do cochlear implants give people normal hearing abilities?

Cochlear implant is actually able to bypass

the unhealthy part of the ear

and stimulate the auditory nerve directly.

A cochlear implant does not sound

like what we experienced hearing to sound like.

People who did have normal hearing

and have normal speech and language skills

and then experienced a type of hearing loss

that required a cochlear implant,

they often say that a cochlear implant

sounds very tinny or robotic,

but they do learn to make sense of it

with a lot of speech therapy.

This is not a surgical procedure

that you do it and you're done,

this is something that does require

a lot of follow up with other professionals

and you do wear a part that is on the outside of your head

and a part over the top of your ear

where the microphone is.

You'll oftentimes see a circle attached

with a wire right here on the skull.

It stays there because there's a piece behind the skin

that magnetizes the two together,

that is your processor,

and that's actually gonna stimulate your auditory nerve

and bypass those unhealthy hair cells.

They have come such a long way

and people do incredibly well with them.

Ktilikesbaseball asked,

any local audiologist out there

that can explain the Yanny v. Laurel thing

and why I hear a different name every hour.

This was hysterical when it came out

and I too would go back and forth between hearing them.

What's happening is Yanny

is a higher frequency sounding word

while Laurel is lower frequency

so it just depends

which one your brain decided to listen to

more so the lower frequencies or the higher frequencies.

Karma Paljor wants to know,

is the hearing aid business a big scam?

Unfortunately, our profession

has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation

because of all of these advertisements

you're seeing out there.

There's a lot of misinformation

and it's really hard to sift through

that's why it's really important

to find an audiologist that you trust.

Anything that seems too good to be true

is too good to be true.

But if you find an audiologist that knows what they're doing

and they truly care about improving your life,

nothing scammy about it,

it's actually a really incredible profession to be in.

That's all the questions that we have.

Till next time.

Make sure you protect your ears.

[upbeat music]