In Our Hearing: Designed and Built for Speech we saw how our ears are optimised up for human speech. So we could loosely define a hearing loss as anything that compromises our ability to hear speech. That compromise may be total or, more commonly, it may be partial.
If we compare hearing to eyesight we can find some similarities. For example, lots of people wear spectacles or contact lenses – but it doesn't mean they're blind! It just means that they need some things sharpened up. It's the same with hearing; there are different levels.
Different Levels of Hearing Loss
A common myth about hearing loss is that you live in your own silent world. But very often that's just not the case. Hearing loss usually just means you can hear some things better than others
For example:
- You may hear the background noise better than the conversation on your table.
- You may hear men's voices better than women's voices
- You may hear the News on television better than a drama
- You may hear the vacuum cleaner better than birdsong
- You may hear vowels better than consonants
All these are examples of hearing loss, where something that would normally be heard by humans is not heard, even though other things can be heard. But how do we know what humans should be capable of hearing?
So, what is ‘Normal’ hearing?
Normal hearing is defined by taking a group of young adults (18 to 30 year olds) who have no history of ear problems or exposure to excessive noise and finding out what they're capable of hearing. This becomes the benchmark to measure everyone's hearing against.
So now we know what a hearing loss is, we can answer the question: who can have a hearing loss?