hearing health

“Sounds that Punch Right Into Your Hearing”

Katherine Bouton Healthy Hearing, Hearing Loss , , , , ,

Are we out of our minds? Just when you think awareness of the dangers of noise might be beginning to catch on, you get a New York Times review of a pop concert headlined “Finding Balance in Braying, Shattering, Crackling Electronics.” (Yes, The New York Times.)

In case you think that’s a rhetorical flourish, the critic Ben Ratliff gets specific in his review of the concert series, called Tinnitus, which concentrates on “composers of extreme sound” and “has some kind of relationship with volume and aggression.”

One group in the series, Container,  emphasized “sampled drum sounds that punch right into your hearing and tons of feedback.”

Another, Vessel, “used bullying low-end blots, wild arcs of pitch-shifting and intricately flickering background layers, barely audible under the braying or shattering top lines.”

Are we completely oblivious of our hearing? I sure hope Container, Vessel, the audience and Ben Ratliff were all wearing noise-cancelling earplugs.

Seahawks Fans Break Their Own Noise Record, Set off “Dance Quake”.

Katherine Bouton Healthy Hearing, Hearing Loss, Noise-canceling headphones , , , , , , , ,

Yup. Dance Quake Outdoes Beast Quake.

If you thought 2011’s “Beast Quake” was loud (see Which NFL Team Has Fans Loud Enough to Trigger Earthquakes?), Seattle fans broke that record when quarterback Russell Wilson shot a pass to Luke Willson, to bring the Seahawks even with Green Bay (a two-point conversion pass, for football fans) with under a minute and a half to go in the game. The stomping and cheering was so loud that it generated a seismic signal even stronger than the famed “Beast Quake.”

It’s that fourth big spike in the seismograph.unnamed

“Whole Lotta Shakin,” NBC News reported. “It was very obvious that large number of fans were jumping up and down in unison at a rate of about 2 jumps per second. Our staff in the press box said that the whole place was shaking so much they thought it might be a real earthquake,” said University of Washington professor Steven Malone.

The tie led to an overtime win, taking the Seahawks to Super Bowl XLIX, which will be played at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. “What a way to finish the season in Seattle,” Malone said. “Too bad we will not be seismically monitoring the Super Bowl.”

OK. I know as someone concerned with noise and its deleterious effects on hearing that I should disapprove. Season-ticket holders should probably get their hearing tested, buy noise-canceling headphones or earplugs, and head to Glendale. And keep on stomping.

AARP Focuses on Healthy Hearing.

Katherine Bouton Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

AARP is making a big foray into the hearing loss field, which is great for those of us who have — or will have — trouble hearing.

Even now, more than half of those with hearing loss are under the age of 60 — that means 24 million of us are already not hearing as well as we could be. By the time we reach age 75 two-thirds of us will have hearing loss. With 8000 baby boomers reaching 65 every single day, that’s going to be a lot of people with hearing loss.

As part of AARP’s effort, I have a new blog on the site, called Healthy Hearing, which will appear at least once a week. The first post is up today. To encourage AARP’s efforts in this direction, please link to the blog and also go to their Hearing Resources Center.

With the support of an enormous and influential group like AARP, people with hearing loss will have a strong advocate, to join the advocacy work done by the Hearing Loss Association of America, the National Institute on Aging, and other groups.

But AARP needs to know we care about this issue. So please click  on the link, tweet it, email it, and tell your friends. And follow it!

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to blog on this site whenever I have something to say!

What’s With the Purple?

Katherine Bouton Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why purple?

I like it, for starters.

But it’s also part of the color scheme of the logo of the Hearing Loss of Association of America. I’m a fan of HLAA, and a member, and a member of the board. I’m grateful to it for advocacy and support on the national and local levels. And for the many friends I’ve made through the organization.

For more information, and for the location of chapters, go to Hearing Loss Association of America.imgres

You might also want to look at the websites for The Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA), The National Association of the Deaf (NAD), AG Bell, and Gallaudet University. They all have useful information, local chapters, and many resources to offer to the deaf and hard of hearing.

Talking About Hearing Loss

Katherine Bouton Healthy Hearing , , , , , ,

Or not, which is more often the case. I didn’t talk about it for the first 30 years I had it, except as a joke, a distraction from the fact that I actually couldn’t hear what someone said to me. That’s okay. We all need to talk less about our various ailments and more about literature and politics and art and the Higgs boson.

But that doesn’t mean we should deny it, to ourselves or to others. Because if we do, that means we aren’t going to hear — or participate in — that conversation about the Higgs boson. (The Higgs is on my mind because I just saw “Particle Fever,” which I can safely say is probably the most fun and interesting and thought-provoking movie you’ll ever see about particle physics).

We also shouldn’t deny it, as a society, because if we do we’re going to end up — in the not so distant future — overwhelmed by a disproportionately large segment of our population who can’t hear, who can’t or won’t correct it, and who therefore can no longer be productive members of society.

So that’s the subject of this blog. Or the main subject anyway. If we talk about hearing loss, if we acknowledge it both personally and as a society, we normalize it. And it IS normal. Twenty percent of our population, from teenagers to nonagenarians has hearing loss. Teenagers themselves have hearing loss in astonishingly high numbers — 19% of them. Most of them don’t realize it, or don’t care, but by ignoring it they’re setting themselves up for hearing problems they won’t be able to ignore — at a much younger age than that should be happening.

My hearing loss is not normal. It began when I was 30. Nobody could figure out why I went from hearing perfectly one day to being practically deaf in one ear the next. They still couldn’t figure it out as I progressively lost almost all the hearing in the other ear as well. But what was normal was how I reacted to it: with jokes, with denial, with a refusal to get hearing aids. And then when it got really bad, when I couldn’t do my job or understand what anyone said to me most of the time, I also got seriously depressed. That’s normal too. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

It was only when I began to speak honestly about my hearing loss that I was able to overcome that depression, to find my life again.

I was good at denial. I fooled a lot of people for a lot of years. Most of them didn’t know know I had hearing loss. But (as I learned when I started being more open about it) they did think something was off. Was I going senile? Was I drunk? Burned out? Bored? How could any of these impressions be preferable to acknowledging a physical disability? A disability that can be treated, that should not be incompatible with a healthy productive life.

Once I acknowledged the severity of my hearing loss – to myself and to others – I began to learn to live with it. And the more open I was about it, the better I seemed to hear. The better I DID hear. In this blog I want to share some what I’ve learned about living well with hearing loss.

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For other information about me, go to katherinebouton.com. That site includes archives of the blog posts I’ve written over the past 18 months, as well as reviews of my book, “Shouting Won’t Help,” information about public appearances, and references to other sites and sources about hearing loss.