Hearing Aids Keep You Engaged Another recent scientifi c study showed that people with hearing loss who ac- tively use hearing aids have a lower risk of mental decline as they age because they tend to stay more engaged in an active social life. Staying in the game of life while taking care of your hearing maximizes your opportunities to stimulate your brain. Kelly points out, “When the sound signals from your ears are compromised by hearing loss, your brain has to work even harder to fi ll in the gaps. This extra effort can take its toll. When you have hearing loss, your brain doesn’t receive the sound informa- tion it needs to understand what is being said and expends more energy trying to fi ll in the blanks.” Conversations become dif- fi cult and exhausting and you may start to withdraw and avoid the social connections that are so important for brain health. The newest hearing aids with BrainHearing™ technology take a proactive “brain fi rst” approach, providing the clearest, most accurate speech signal possible so that your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to understand what is being said. The mental effort you need to understand speech in a noisy environment is minimized so you can conserve the cognitive resources you need to engage in socializing and other


brain-stimulating activities. By restoring the ability to com- municate, hearing aids with BrainHearing™ technology allow you to participate more easily in conversation, even in noisy settings like restaurants or social gatherings. It separates speech from noise and lets you focus on what’s important. Kelly shares that “the hearing aid works in harmony with your brain to process sounds fast, with better speech understand- ing, less listening fatigue, and


best of all, it even helps you to remember more of your conversations.” The result is a more natural, effortless listening experi- ence. This means less demanding mental processing throughout the day so you can engage more actively in everyday life.


New Study Shows Hearing Loss Impacts Brain Function


Another new study indicates that our


brain “reorganizes” when we start to lose our hearing. The study, done at the Univer- sity of Colorado’s Department of Speech Language and Hearing Science, looked at how neuroplasticity — how the brain reorganizes itself by forming new neuron connections throughout life — plays into the adaptation of the brain after we start to lose our hearing. The study sought to answer two questions:


1) How does the brain adapt to hearing loss?


2) What are the resulting implications? Neuroplasticity is, in effect, the brain’s


ability to change at any age. Conventional wisdom used to view the brain as static and unable to change; scientists now know this is not the case. In the case of hearing


THIS SCAN WAS USED BY RESEARCHERS TO PROVIDE A GLIMPSE BEHIND HOW OUR BRAIN ABSORBS SOUND. ANU SHARMA/UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO


loss, the part of the brain devoted to hear- ing can actually become reorganized, i.e. reassigned to other functions.


The participants in the study were


adults and children with varying degrees of hearing loss; some had only mild hearing loss while others were severely hearing impaired or deaf. Using up to 128 sensors attached to the scalp of each subject, the team of researchers used EEG recordings to measure brain activities in response to sound stimulation. By doing this, they were able to understand how the brains of people with different degrees of hear- ing loss respond differently than those of people with normal hearing.


Perhaps most importantly, the re-


searchers found when hearing loss occurs, areas of the brain devoted to other senses such as vision or touch will actually take over the areas of the brain which nor- mally process hearing. It’s a phenomenon called cross-modal cortical reorganization , which is refl ective of the brain’s tendency to compensate for the loss of other senses. Essentially, the brain adapts to a loss by rewiring itself. It is a makeover of sorts, but one that can have a seriously detrimental effect on cognition.


In those with hearing loss, the com- pensatory adaptation system signifi cantly


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