Hearing loss, autism, and cognitive decline

Recent news articles have identified hearing loss as a risk factor. dementia. as autistic person I have long recognized that differences in sensory systems can be severely disabling. Hearing is an easy example, but autism is ADHDdyslexia also shows that, and now everything is also associated with cognitive impairment.

Our sensory systems decline as we age. For the elderly, losing sight or hearing can be frightening. Symptoms become even worse when the threat of dementia is added. However, partial blindness and hearing loss are part of aging. The same goes for loss of taste and smell.

News that the possibility of hearing loss increases Decline in cognitive function Predictable. Whenever you fail to perceive things in the same way as those around you, you end up being a strange man (or woman).

With autism, I may find something funny, but you may find it sad and my reaction may offend you. With hearing loss, you think I don’t care because you hear things and I don’t, and you respond and I don’t respond. In both cases, the interaction fails and you both lose. As the rejected party (i.e. the autistic or deaf party), we tend to suffer even more.

Whether this happens as a child or as an adult, the more failures we have in our interactions, the more withdrawn we become. Children with autism and other developmental differences tend to become withdrawn. childhood.

Others, like me, learn workarounds and coping strategies. Then we can get out of the obstacle. Others do not, and they enter adulthood isolated, isolated, and often with cognitive impairments that are considered permanent.

Recent research suggests that people with autism may have more disabilities and become ‘more autistic’ as they get older, even if they previously lived independently and successfully. . Social disconnection in old age, with the potential for cognitive decline, portends even greater disability later in life. The reasons for this are not all clear, but for many autistic people and other neurologically different people, it is a concern.

Stories about hearing loss and dementia in later life depict a similar situation. When our ability to understand language declines, we lose connection with others. We learn to stop attending meetings, or to nod or smile when we don’t understand what someone is saying.

Cutting makes us forget, but a polite smile often leads to the judgment that “it feels good, but not very sharp.” As this worsens, we have fewer opportunities to use our cognitive abilities, and just like physical strength that comes with aging, it declines if we don’t use it.

Even if autism progresses and the person loses cognitive abilities, becomes deaf, or cannot see well enough to go outside, the outcome is much the same.

I am fairly widely known as an autistic person, but today I am what many would call a neurodivergent person. Not many people know that I’m partially deaf, but it’s true and it’s getting worse. After years of playing in loud rock and roll bands and experimenting with guns, explosives, race cars, and power tools, it’s no surprise that he developed severe hearing loss in his 60s.

Testing by a local audiologist revealed that my hearing fell off a cliff at a frequency of 4,186Hz, which corresponds to C8, the highest pitch on a piano. Synthesizers can play notes an octave higher, but my hearing gets weaker as I go up, and I can’t hear notes a few keys higher. This is a significant portion of the audio spectrum that is to be lost, and it has been happening invisibly for years.

The obvious answer for hearing aid manufacturers is to boost high frequencies. But the audiologist showed me that the extent of my loss would require a boost of 100x or more and that it would be as dangerous as a sonic knife. cutting to my ears.

Still, those high notes are important. Speech contains sibilant sounds (such as the s and t at the end of words) and the crisp sounds of music that make speech intelligible. Now I understand why you have trouble understanding conversations in noisy spaces.

The advent of digital signal processing has enabled hearing aid manufacturers to isolate sounds that are too high to be heard. You can lower the frequency to make it more audible. When I heard the results, it was like magic. Voices and music came alive again.

In another processing step, A.I.– Enhanced voice recognition technology identifies your voice and lifts it above the surrounding sound field, making it even more audible. Thanks to these two technologies, you can now almost understand what’s going on in a noisy room, compared to almost nothing before. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than before.

Readers who know my previous work in audio engineering will know how important this is to me. The best hearing aids use technology that is generations older than what I worked with in the 1970s, but the underlying mathematics is the same. I’m amazed that hearing aid manufacturers have reduced their computing power to hearing aids small enough to be invisible above my ears.

Advanced technology has made it possible to avoid the worst effects of hearing loss disability on a large portion of the aging population. It’s something that creeps up on all of us, and if you’re reading this and you’re over 55, it’s you.

Cognitive decline, whatever the cause, is one of the worst things about aging, and hearing loss is one place where there are effective tools to help many of us. However, hearing industry research shows that only 10 percent of those who could benefit do so.

One reason for this is that hearing loss progresses so slowly that people often cannot recognize what they are no longer hearing. But we all suffer loss, whether we know it or not. (When thinking about New Year’s resolutions, it might be worth adding a hearing check.)

Although we have not traditionally thought about hearing loss through the lens of psychology, hearing loss affects our behavior and now, as we see, it affects our behavior. is given. cognition. The same applies to our other senses. I look forward to technology serving many of us for decades to come. treatment, psychiatric Medicine and medical research do not have the alleviation of obstacles through science and technology.