Worldwide, 34 million children suffer from deafness or hearing loss, 60% of which is due to preventable causes. At the other end of life, approximately 30% of people over the age of 60 have hearing loss.
Someone who cannot hear as well as someone with normal hearing (hearing thresholds of 20 dB or better in both ears) has hearing loss. Hearing loss can be mild, moderate, severe or profound. It can affect one or both ears and leads to problems hearing conversational speech or loud sounds.
'Hard of hearing' refers to people with hearing loss ranging from mild to severe. People with hearing impairment usually communicate through spoken language and may benefit from hearing aids, cochlear implants and other assistive devices, in addition to closed captioning.
'Deaf' people usually have a severe hearing loss, that is, very little or no hearing. They often use sign language to communicate.
Can deaf people hear their thoughts?
Deaf people think in terms of their 'inner voice'. Some of them come to mindASL(American Sign Language), while others think in the vocal language they have learned, while their brains figure out what the vocal language sounds like. Furthermore, their thought process is somewhat different from that of hearing people. When they think, they see themselves drawing from the first-person point of view or the third-person point of view. When they imagine a hearing person speaking, they imagine him signing instead of speaking because that way he can understand him.
Because there are no signs for every word in ASL, deaf people who want to think of a word that doesn't have a sign sometimes spell it with their fingers. It's like imagining letters in hand shapes. Finger spelling is more common when a deaf person reads words instead of signing them.
Do deaf people hear their own voice when they speak?
A number of deaf respondents to the Quora question suggest that this is indeed the case. However, the age at which hearing loss occurs is likely important in determining the modality of inner speech/gestures. One participant who lost his hearing at age 2 says he thinks in words, but words without sound, while another person with early hearing loss describes "hearing" a voice indreamin the absence of signs or lip movements.
Several studies have shed light on how people with hearing loss use internal cues. There is proof of thatInternal signals mediate short-term memoryin signing individuals, just as inner speech mediates short-term memory in hearing people. In aneuroimaging research, brain areas related to inner speech were activated when sign language speakers thought to themselves in gestures, which suggested a common signneuralway of thinking in a language that is independent of the modality of the language in question.
Does a deaf person want an inner voice?
It turns out that this varies somewhat from deaf person to deaf person, depending on the level of deafness and voice training.
Anyone who was born completely deaf and has only learned sign language will not surprisingly think of sign language. The surprising thing is that those who are born completely deaf, but learn to speak through voice training, occasionally think not only of the specific sign language they know, but sometimes also of the vocal language they have learned and that shapes their brains. what the vocal language sounds like. But especially the most completely deaf people think in sign language. Just as the 'inner voice' of a hearing person is experienced in their own voice, a totally deaf person sees himself, or rather, feels himself a sign in his head while 'talking' in his head.
What language do deaf people think of?
For deaf people who are not completely deaf or wear hearing aids, they will often experience more vocal language in their 'inner voice' compared to how much they can hear.
To understand how language affects our thoughts, and how it affects the way deaf people think, we must first understand the underlying nature of human thinking.
People generally think in terms of words, images, or a combination of both:
- Some people mainly think inord, meaning their thoughts are dominated by words and stories.
- Other people mainly think inPictures, which means that their thoughts are dominated by images and pictures.
The ability to hear words can influence whether a person thinks in words or images. Many people who are born deaf have never had the opportunity to hear spoken speech. This makes it very unlikely that they can also think with the help of speech.
Because the primary way deaf people process language is through visual forms of communication, they are more likely to think in images. These images can be pictures and images of objects. Or it may involve seeing word gestures, as in sign language, or seeing moving lips, as in lip reading.
What about thinking in images?
This phenomenon of visually seeing signs and moving lips may also be intertwined with auditory thoughts (words) in people who were not born deaf.
In this case, the thoughts of previously hearing people will be influenced, among other things, by how much language they have learned and what their native language is.
A deaf respondent to the Quora question says, "I have a 'voice' in my head, but it's not audio-based. I'm a visual being, so in my head I see ASL signs or pictures or sometimes printed words ." " For this respondent, sound is not part of the experience.
How the brain adapts to hearing loss and deafness
Researchers at the University of Colorado suggest that the part of the brain concerned with hearing can be reorganized – reallocated to other functions – even with early-stage hearing loss, and may play a role in cognitive decline.
Anu Sharma, from the University of Colorado's Department of Speech Language and Hearing Sciences, applied the basic principles of neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to make new connections, to determine how it adapts to hearing loss and the consequences of those changes.
Sharma's group's work focuses on electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of adults and children with deafness and mild hearing loss, to understand how their brains respond differently from those of people with normal hearing.
Sharma, along with his students Julia Campbell and Garrett Cardon, also recently discovered that 'cross-modal recruitment of the auditory part of the brain by the visual and tactile senses not only occurs in deaf patients, but is also clearly evident in deaf patients. adult patients with only a mild degree of hearing loss."
“The auditory areas of the brain shrink with age-related hearing loss,” she continued. “Centers of the brain typically used for higher-level decision-making are then activated just by hearing sounds.”
The group's work suggests that the part of the brain used for hearing can be reorganized even in the earliest stages of age-related hearing loss. And "these compensatory changes increase the overall burden on the brain in older adults," Sharma said. This finding has important clinical implications for the development of early screening programs for hearing loss in adults.
Is the age at which you lose your hearing a factor?
While the brain's ability to adapt and change is remarkable, the sad fact is that this reorganization of cells in the auditory cortex often leads to faster cognitive decline. In age-related hearing loss, the auditory cortex shrinks. Areas of the brain normally responsible for decision-making or more cognitive tasks activate only to hear sounds, leaving you with less brain power to think clearly or make decisions. These changes, which begin in the early stages of hearing loss, tax the brain and help explain how hearing loss and dementia are linked, because the reorganization taxes other parts of the brain, causing overload and causing tension and fatigue.
Even in the earliest stages of hearing loss, neuroplasticity is at work, creating new connections and leaving fewer and fewer cells dedicated to hearing. It's really a case of use it or lose it, but with serious consequences. Once these new connections are established and the brain reorganizes the cells to be used for things other than hearing, those cells never switch to processing sounds again, even if you get a hearing aid. This means that the longer you wait to seek treatment, and the longer you live with untreated hearing loss, the less effective the treatment will be when you finally start taking care of your hearing. Hearing loss is no joke, and age-related hearing loss should be taken seriously once it starts. “One in three adults over the age of 60 has age-related hearing loss,” says Sharma. “Given that even a small degree of hearing loss can cause secondary changes in the brain, adult hearing screenings and hearing aid intervention should be considered much earlier to protect against brain reorganization.”
What audiologists and deaf professionals say
What is it like to be deaf?
Being deaf is not that unusual. According to data from the CDC, 44 million Americans (and about 17% of the adult population) suffer from hearing loss in both ears.
Hearing loss can range from mild to moderate to severe. The Internet's largest website for hearing and hearing loss,Hear it, gives the following definitions:
Mild:People with mild hearing loss may have some difficulty following conversations, especially in noisy environments. The softest sounds that can be heard are between 25 and 40 decibels (dB).
Moderate:Difficulty following conversations without a hearing aid. The softest sounds that can be heard are between 40 – 70 dB.
Serious:People with severe hearing loss need powerful hearing aids and often lip reading. The softest sounds they can hear are between 70 and 95 dB.
Things you probably didn't know about hearing loss
1. Deaf people are often (wrongly) accused of rudeness
Nothing is more annoying than being ignored when you try to talk to someone, right? But the next time you find yourself in this situation and become irritated, take a moment to think about whether the person you're talking to might be deaf or hard of hearing. If this is the case, they may simply not have heard or understood you (and given how small hearing aids are these days, that's not always easy to tell).
2. Hearing is not the same as understanding
Deafness not only affects hearing, but also general communication skills. This is largely because people who are deaf or hard of hearing often have much less exposure to language and vocabulary throughout their lives. Make no mistake: this does NOT mean deaf people are stupid! It just means they have to work much harder to understand a conversation.
3. Hearing strain and exhaustion are a reality
Think about the pain in your head after a long day of studying. It's tiring to have to work so hard to listen and understand, isn't it? Think about people who are deaf. For them, communicating is ALWAYS hard work, even if they are just at a party or ordering a cup of coffee. Whether they're frantically lip-reading or straining to hear what's being said, it's downright exhausting.
4. Communicating in the dark is basically impossible
If you think about it, there are plenty of times when there is little or no light and you have to rely solely on your hearing to communicate (think campfires, dance floors, and movie theaters). For most of us this isn't a problem, but if you are deaf or hard of hearing it's a whole different matter! Even with hearing aids such as cochlear implants, many deaf people rely heavily on lip reading.
5. Deaf people are twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety
Life can be hard at the best of times, but when you take into account the challenges of being deaf, it's even harder. Deaf people can very easily become isolated, cut off and excluded, especially if others do not make enough effort to communicate. After all, communication is at the heart of most relationships – and we need it to live happy, connected lives!
Common myths about hearing loss and deafness
Myth: All hearing losses are the same.
FACT: The term 'deafness' covers a wide range of hearing loss that has very different effects on a person's ability to process sound and therefore understand speech.
Myth: All deaf people are mute.
FACT: Some deaf people speak very well and clearly; Others don't because their hearing loss prevented them from learning spoken language. Deafness usually has little effect on the vocal cords, and very few deaf people are truly mute.
Myth: Hearing aids restore hearing.
FACT: Hearing aids amplify sound. They have no effect on a person's ability to process that sound. In cases where hearing loss distorts incoming sounds, a hearing aid cannot do anything.
Myth: All deaf people can read lips.
FACT: Some deaf people are very good lip readers, but many are not. This is because many speech sounds have identical lip movements. For example, "b" and "p" look exactly the same on the lips.
Myth: All deaf people use sign language.
FACT: Many deaf people, especially those who were deaf at a young age, use sign language. Many others don't. Several sign systems have been developed in America in addition to American Sign Language – the language commonly used by the profoundly deaf.
Myth: Deaf people are not sensitive to noise.
FACT: Some types of hearing loss accentuate sensitivity to noise. Loud sounds become unreadable and unpleasant. Hearing aid users often find loud sounds, which are strongly amplified by their device, very uncomfortable.
