Everyone knows headphones could be bad to your hearing in the event you hearken to sounds too loudly in close proximity to your ears. But a BBC report suggests that a brand new health scare may very well be emerging across the noise-canceling feature that’s hugely popular in modern earphones.
The article considers whether the technology could essentially be rewiring the brains of people that repeatedly attempt to tune out pesky background noise using noise cancelation, including a 25-year-old British woman whose hearing test got here back normal but who had trouble specializing in sounds and was subsequently diagnosed with audio processing disorder (APD). APD is a neurological condition affecting the brain’s ability to grasp sounds and spoken words.
Five audiology departments within the U.K.’s National Health Service told the BBC that there was an increase within the variety of young people referred to them with similar issues related to their ability to process sounds. So the query is: what’s interfering with normal brain functioning in such cases?
One theory posited by the article is that noise-canceling tech may very well be resulting in the brain forgetting the way to filter sounds itself. The patient’s audiologist has also called for more research into the impact of the technology.
