Can Hearing Aids Make You Smarter? Research On Cognitive Hearing and Listening Fatigue Says They Can — Is The Industry Finally Listening?

Hearing aid manufacturers have finally started listening to ten years of academic research into concepts known as “cognitive hearing,” “listening fatigue” and “cognitive fatigue.” It took them long enough, but I’m not complaining, because at least they are finally claiming to attack the problem of hearing loss at its roots.

In recent announcements of their next-generation hearing aids, industry leaders Starkey Laboratories and Oticon both claimed their new products would ameliorate “cognitive fatigue” and therefore improve not only hearing but also the ability to listen and understand. Since the invention of the hearing aid, the industry has focused mostly on simple amplification that makes noise louder and therefore easier to hear. Too often, hearing aids amplify the noises uses don’t want to hear and actually make it more difficult to comprehend the sounds — speech — they do want to hear. Now the industry is finally trying to address the critical issue of better cognition.

While neither Starkey nor Oticon went so far as to say their hearing aids would make you smarter, that’s really the value proposition the industry should start trying to deliver. No, hearing aids can’t make you smarter all by themselves. But hearing well can enable you to listen well, and listening well can enable you to better understand what you hear, better understanding makes it easier for you to communicate in real time with other people, and intelligent communication lets your brain be as smart as it naturally wants to be. Now think of the same scenario in reverse: no hearing assistance means less listening means less understanding means less intelligent communication. In other words, failure to get a good pair of hearing aids can make you appear to be a whole lot stupider than you really are.

The catch is what constitutes a “good pair of hearing aids.” Dr. Brent Edwards at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California has been looking at the issue of “cognitive hearing” for years, and his work is finally working its way into the products Starkey is delivering to the marketplace. Instead of looking at the problem from the outside in with the mechanics of replacing lost hearing with amplified sound, Edwards and other researchers have looked at it from the inside out by studying how the brain interprets sounds and uses them to create understanding and intelligence. Critical, previously ignored issues —  such as how the brain processes and then ignores background noise, how it picks up nuances in timbre and tone to make fine distinctions between similar-sounding consonants in speech, and how the mental overhead required to compensate for hearing loss affects overall cognitive performance — are now providing guideposts for product developers deciding on how to use the new wealth of digital technology and software to process sound in helpful ways.

A four-year old presentation Edwards gave at the American Academy of Audiology conference is available here. It’s a good starting point for anyone who wants to understand issues surrounding cognitive hearing and hearing-aid product development better. It also points to the research of others in the field, especially Robert Sweetow, who did pioneering studies on how therapeutic training in hearing and listening can dramatically improve comprehension, a concept embodied in Neurtone’s LACE training software.

Will the new hearing aids from Starkey and Oticon prove to be revolutionary, game-changing breakthroughs in delivering on the promise not just of better hearing but of better cognition? More likely, they will be incremental but important advances in today’s hearing-aid technologies. But I’m more optimistic now that with a new awareness of and focus on the core issue of better hearing — better performance in life through better cognition and understanding — the industry will eventually find ways to deliver on the promise.