Volume Control by David Owen

Author:David Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

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A DISCOURAGING FACT ABOUT HEARING AIDS is that people with hearing problems who do finally visit an audiologist, and agree to spend thousands of dollars, often feel exasperated from the outset. They wear their fancy aids for a few weeks, then put them in a drawer and never touch them again, or they lose them and don’t replace them, or they wear them only once in a while, as President Reagan initially did. When that happens, it’s not because they’re upset that their aids don’t count their steps or enable them to converse with their Parisian taxi driver. It’s because they’re disappointed in the way their aids handle the one task that truly interests them: helping them hear better.

My own aids do something annoying that I didn’t notice until a day or two after I’d received them: in quiet environments they make a constant audible SHHHH sound, which jumps in volume slightly in response to sudden noises, like snapping my fingers, typing, clicking on a light, or turning the page of a book. The reason is that the aids react to silence by turning up the gain, and then react to noise by quickly, but not instantaneously, turning it down—resulting in a steady background whoosh that jumps in volume slightly, after a brief delay, in response to discrete sounds. I notice it only in relative silence, and if my hearing were worse I might not notice it at all. But it bugs me enough to make me not want to wear my hearing aids in situations where they might help.

The most common source of disappointment with hearing aids is that even the most expensive ones don’t correct faulty hearing in the same way that eyeglasses correct faulty eyesight. If your vision is blurred because your eyeball is shaped in a way that prevents light from landing correctly on the retina—that is, if you have myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, or presbyopia—being fitted with the right corrective lenses (or undergoing a surgical procedure like Lasik) can give you perfect vision, enabling you to see the way people who don’t need glasses see. When my wife got her first pair of glasses, in second grade, she shouted, with astonishment, “I can see inside that truck!”—and a friend, equally astonished, asked, “Did they give you X-ray vision?” I had a similar experience, in fifth grade, when I realized that my brand-new glasses enabled me to make out individual leaves on trees. Hearing aids don’t do the equivalent with sound. If you’ve lost all ability to detect frequencies above 5,000 hertz, no hearing aid can give that back. A hearing aid can turn up sounds you now detect only faintly, but they can’t transform you into the person you were before you discovered rock and roll.

Even technological breakthroughs can constitute an impediment to hearing-aid use. Modern batteries are remarkably small—an amazing achievement unless you have arthritic fingers or an age-related tremor, in which case prying open your hearing aid’s plastic battery door, removing the

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