(Without being able to hear a consonant, it’s hard to distinguish between words like hat and cat, for instance.) This leads to a situation where you can hear someone, but can’t understand them, DeMari says.
TTS affects your hearing in the higher frequencies-that’s how you hear consonant sounds, which are essential to conveying a word’s meaning in English. For the hair cells, it’s a traumatic experience-they remain bent over, even after there’s no noise, which leads to ringing, fullness, and that temporary loss of hearing. Loud sounds bombard your ears, pushing those hair cells that transmit sound over, DeMari says. “Each hair cell is tonotopically organized-or tuned-to a specific frequency for optimal transmission of the sounds you hear.” Your ears' cells are damaged The fluid creates waves over tiny rows of hair cells, he explains. “In a nutshell, sound enters the ear and eventually stimulates the fluid in the inner ear (cochlea),” says audiologist Steve DeMari, director of business development and education at CaptionCall. To understand why that’s a big deal, let’s take a step back and examine how hearing works.
That blare of loud noise from a concert, too-high earbuds, a jackhammer while you work, does a number on the cells within your ear. This is what’s known as temporary threshold shift (TTS), and as the name indicates, the temporary hearing loss or tinnitus that results is typically fleeting.īut those symptoms-the clogged-up ears, the ringing-are indications of damage, and repeated bouts of TTS could lead to permanent harm to your hearing.
Sounds are muffled, your ears feel full, and you may have ringing in your ears (aka tinnitus). We’ve probably all had this experience: You attend a concert, and when you leave the arena, your hearing is disconcertingly awry.