Audiologists raise concern over headphone use in young people
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"It doesn't happen to me, so it must not be a real thing"
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I have ADHD and sometimes can't focus to do more brain intensive work if I'm in a room with a bunch of people talking. Street/background noise doesn't bother me at all. I grew up suburb rural adjacent but I've worked in huge cities for long periods and it just doesn't bother me like six people having two conversations would.
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I really struggle to process voices, but I hear absolutely everything.
Someone talking to me can get completely drowned out by a 15KHz hum of an electronic device, the acoustics of a room or a TV in the background.
Yet, I ask them if they are having trouble hearing me over all the noise. They usually reply "wharlt noise?" If it's a high-pitch hum, they won't acknowledge the noise even if I show them on a spectral analyser.
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APD doesn't have similarities with ADHD. ADHD can cause APD but APD like many other common symptoms is not in the official catalog of symptoms for ADHD. But it makes sense when you think of ADHD as "not being able to prioritize input" so all you hear is processed simultaneously.
I'm not saying the doctors are wrong. But they don't know why she has it and I'm just saying that there may be a link that they're not seeing because of years of wrong diagnosis criteria for ADHD and Autism. Hell until 2013 they told that it is impossible to have both and today we know that the overlap is somewhere between 30 and 50%.
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If it's a high-pitched hum, they may genuinely be unable to hear it. It's common for people to lose their hearing in very high registers quickly as they age (like, most teens still hear them, but thirty-somethings mostly don't). Without noticing, since it doesn't impede day-to-day communication.
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So wait, I'm not just a grumpy old man who doesn't like a lot of noise, this is actually a disorder?
Honestly though it's an interesting question and I wonder if this is just the "natural state." I really started to feel it after I went RVing for a year. It's a relatively recent (in the overall span of humanity) development that people would be in groups large enough to make this be an issue.
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I am 29 and I already have minuscule hearing loss (if results of the last hearing test were factual), and I don't really listen to music/podcasts on headphones that much either.
I am also one of these people who still has regular PC speakers instead of gaming headsets or whatever.
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Nope it's a very reasonable hypothesis. "Symptom X suddenly occurs frequently. That started when people started doing Y. According to our understanding, Y has a direct impact on the functioning of X". Causation has still to be established formally but it'd be quite surprising if it was mere correlation, as in it would overturn the understanding audiologists have about how things work.
Bluntly said: If you never train filtering out noise, then you suck at filtering out noise. That looks dead obvious, if it's wrong, then in a very, very interesting way. General relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics kind of interesting.
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Sure, but it's still pretty irresponsible of the BBC to publish what is effectively educated guesses as something to be concerned about.
This belongs in an academic article. Not a news one.
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The problem is not the hypothesis, the problem is that it isn't really presented as a hypothesis. Reporting on the results before doing the experiment isn't the way to go.
Our theories of how the world works are necessarily incomplete, and experiments turn up things that overturn scientific understanding often enough. The way this is set up matches a common pattern of vilifying tech without seeing whether it's deserved or not. Maybe not wearing a noise cancellation headset would, in fact, help this patient, but until that's tested and found out to be true, reporting on it is just spreading FUD.
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her audiologist believes
(emphasis mine). Belief is colloquial speech for working hypothesis. Her prescription will have been along the lines of "ease on those headphones, go to a forest or park and just listen, use them only if you really feel them to be necessary, try to expose yourself".
"Nothing can ever be acted upon unless we have a meta-study examining fifty double-blind studies" is pseudoscepticism.
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but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.
Me, wearing my noise-cancelling headphones for 10+ hours a day ....
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No it’s not. Experts in their field are seeing a strong correlation in behaviors that could harm your health. It’s the perfect place for an audiologist to speak to this issue.
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This is not the same thing, as the other comment explains.
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I have my noise cancelling airpods pro, but never use ANC because it has that white noise sound I don't like. It's basically blasting more noise in your earhole to drown out/cancel out the noise around you.
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And they also have a theoretical basis for their hypothesis. You don't have to have 100% experimental proof about something to take initial action, especially to avoid harm.
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Yeah, ANC quality can vary a lot and generally it's even worse for earbuds.
I have a pair of Bose QC Ultra headphones which have amazing ANC.
A few month back there was a constuction site across the street. At one point I felt my desk vibrating, so I took of my headphones ... only then did I realised they were using a jackhammer.
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As the world become more and more noisy. And people become more a more shitty with regards of doing noise without care about how it affects others. ANC become a necessity for some people.
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Tbh this just sounds like ADHD or something.
It's APD (Auditory Processing Disorder). That's explained in the article.
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We also had an expert who started the vacines cause autism trying to peddle a new replacement for the MMR vaccine. (This is my opinion based on the research done Here )Just because "an expert" says something, doesn't mean it's true. And blindly listening to them can cause harm as well.
This is a fallacy called Argument of authority
No, it's completely irresponsible to say something not peer reviewed and actually studied.
