I was working with one of our patients the other day delivering her new Phonak Audeo Yes IX’s. She really did not think she needed “hearing aids”, after answering a few questions about her hearing loss we proceeded.

What is cool is that when we put the new hearing instruments on she says “what is that noise that sounds like a fountain or water running”. I explained to her that she is hearing the rain outside, she couldn’t believe that she was not hearing the rain before. She really could not believe the difference, it was really cool to be able to share this moment with her and her husband.

Her husband proceeded to turn the T.V. on to the volume she likes to listen to it every night. When he turned it on she yelled to him that was way to loud. She couldn’t believe that she would have ever had the T.V. that loud. What an eye opener!

Also what is neat is that here is a woman that thinks she might not even need them, to saying “I am keeping them in all day”. I never realized what I have been missing came next this is my favorite line from all the new users.

Gotta love this job!

American Tinnitus Association, P.O. Box 5, Portland, OR 97207-0005
Phone: 800-634-8978 — FAX: 503-248-0024

Great info from American Tinnitus Assoc., thought I would re-post it here. Check out their website at www.ata.org, great site.

Twenty tips to help you manage your tinnitus

Diagnose & understand your tinnitus

1. DO NOT panic. Tinnitus is usually not a sign of a serious, ongoing medical condition.
2. CHECK things out. The sounds you hear may actually be normal sounds created by the human body at work.
3. SEE an audiologist or ear, nose and throat specialist (ENT) interested and experienced in tinnitus treatment.
4. REVIEW your current medications (prescription, over-the-counter, vitamins and other supplements) with your medical professional to find possible causes of your tinnitus.
5. BE WARY of a hopeless diagnosis or physician advice like, “There’s nothing you can do about your tinnitus. Go home and live with it.”
6. BE a detective. Keep track of what triggers your tinnitus.
7. KEEP UP TO DATE about tinnitus. More and more research by the best and the brightest is bringing us closer to successful treatments and cures for tinnitus.

Find good treatment & take care of yourself

8. BE KIND to yourself. Developing tinnitus means you have undergone a significant physical, emotional and maybe even life-style change.
9. EXAMINE how you live to find ways to eliminate or reduce some stress in different parts of your life; stress often makes tinnitus worse.
10. PAY ATTENTION to what you eat. One-by-one, eliminate possible sources of tinnitus aggravation, e.g., salt, artificial sweeteners, sugar, alcohol, prescription or over-the-counter medications, tobacco and caffeine.
(Do not stop taking medications without consulting with your health care professional.)
11. DON’T GIVE UP on a treatment if it doesn’t work right away. Some can take quite a while to have a positive effect.
12. PROTECT YOURSELF from further auditory damage by avoiding loud places and by using earplugs when you can’t avoid loud noise.

Your attitude matters

13. DO NOT create any negative forecasts for your tinnitus, such as “This is never going to get any better.” Counting on a better future can help you create one.
14. TAKE HEART. In many cases people with tinnitus “habituate” to it, meaning they get used to it and notice it less than at first.
15. BE INVOLVED in your recovery. Consider yourself part of your treatment team where your thoughts and feelings should count.
16. DO NOT WASTE time blaming yourself for your tinnitus. The causes of tinnitus are varied and difficult to determine.

Line up support

17. LOCATE people who understand your struggles and learn that you are not alone. Have people in your life who, though they cannot “see” or “hear” your tinnitus, understand that you have it.
18. FIND a support group that will truly understand your struggles with tinnitus and help you sort out useful from useless information. You will find compassion, companionship and coping strategies. (ATA has information on tinnitus support groups and individual, helpful volunteers.)
19. EDUCATE your family, friends and co-workers about tinnitus; tell them about the conditions and settings that are difficult for you; and ask them for their support.
20. CONTINUE SEEKING reliable information from ATA and other credible sources.

Research
Examining The Cocktail Party Effect

Call it the cocktail party effect: how an individual can participate in a one-on-one conversation within a cluster of people, switch to another, pick up important comments while tuning out others, change topics and return to the first conversation.

This selective switching of attention which relies on disengaging and re-engaging attention to different voices on a time scale of a tenth of a second, can pose challenges for anyone with normal hearing.
“These findings shed light on why, in listening environments such as noisy parties or restaurants, it is more difficult to follow a conversation involving many people (where the relevant talker often and unexpectedly changes locations) than to focus on one talker (at one location) exclusively,” the study found. “These results may have implications for visual attention in tasks where object formation and target segmentation is challenging, or where the identity of a visual object depends upon continuity of visual features over time.”
The dynamics of this process—the time it takes to more precisely hear what is being said in environments with competing sounds—has received little study in the field of neuroscience, but it is the subject of a recently completed research study entitled “Object continuity enhances selective auditory attention,” published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The same crowded scene presents far more problems for the hearing impaired who have trouble listening to one sound and ignoring others in everyday settings like a restaurant or in a business meeting. They struggle to listen—even with a hearing aid—and are often exhausted and frustrated by their efforts, unable keep pace with others who can tune out voices and more precisely pick out and stay with one conversation.

A first step toward helping hearing-impaired listeners requires a better understanding of how people with normal hearing perceive and process a mix of sounds over time. This auditory ability to switch attention and, in the next instant, reset focus on whatever the new speaker says is something about which little is known.
The authors are Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, a Boston University professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, and graduate students Virginia Best, Erol J. Ozmeral, and Norbert Kopco.

The research team measured this complex acoustic scene by studying how switching attention spatially influenced a listener’s ability to recall a sequence of spoken digits. Five loudspeakers were distributed horizontally in front of the listener. The listener identified sequences of four digits presented either from the same loudspeaker or from different ones chosen randomly on each digit. Visual cues—lights—indicated the target loudspeaker at each temporal position in the sequence. The remaining four loudspeaker presented simultaneous distractor digits, the study noted.

The study examined normal listeners’ reactions when the target voice changed from digit to digit and conditions in which the target voice was the same.

The results showed the recall of the spoken digits was best when they all came from the same loudspeaker compared to hearing each number from different speakers. Recall of the sequence degraded when listeners had to instantaneously switch attention to a new location for each digit, and listeners got better at filtering out sounds from others when they focused attention to a voice at a fixed location.

Sustaining attention to one continuous auditory stream led to refinements in selective attention over time. This improvement over time depended on the perceived continuity of the stream of target digits, and proved greatest when the digits sounded like they came from one person talking from a fixed location. The progress was reduced when different voices spoke each target digit and when delays between the digits were abnormally long (so that each digit was perceived as an isolated number). Researchers also measured how fast a listener would switch or redirect their hearing the stream of digits—the finite time required to disengage and then re-engage attention.

Shinn-Cunningham will be continuing studies of how the brain controls auditory attention in complex settings through a National Security Science and Engineering fellowship, as she undertakes a 5-year program that uses behavioral experiments and direct, noninvasive measures of electrical brain activity to extend her studies of how attention enables us to communicate in settings with multiple, competing sounds.

[Source: Medical News Today]