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Hope Lanter explains how the brain adapts to gradual hearing loss, making new hearing aids feel jarring at first. Your brain recalibrates its expectations over time, much like teeth adjusting to braces.
Hope Lanter explains how the brain adapts to gradual hearing loss, making new hearing aids feel jarring at first. Your brain recalibrates its expectations over time, much like teeth adjusting to braces.
And so as it's almost like a little dimmer switch where things are gradually getting softer and softer and softer, what we know is that the brain has to say, "Well, how do I adapt to learn to hear as well as I can with what I'm given?" And so normal hearing to us is actually our hearing loss. And so that's what we're used to, that's what we know, that's how things are supposed to sound. So when our brain does a little bit of a the check engine light moment of saying, "Is everything okay?" Hearing the way I heard yesterday is what my expectation is. As soon as I changed that, I'm suddenly saying, "Okay, now, now what do we do? This doesn't sound right." I think about the day that my daughter got her braces and we came home that night and her teeth were hurting. And I remember her saying, "Mom, I just wish I could rip these things out of my head." And I thought, you know what? Hearing aids are not that different. I guarantee you, if we had a hearing aid that we glued into your ear and you said, "Oh, I just wish I could take this thing out," you would not really have the same result a month from now because your brain starts to get used to things.
