Do you ever feel exhausted by social situations? Frustrated that you’ve missed what someone said? Anxious that you don’t want to answer back something incorrect? Irritated in noisy environments? Giving up on feeling included so you’d rather stay home?

These experiences could be signs that your brain needs more sound. When you live with a hearing loss, you must work harder to hear. This can be particularly challenging when you’re in a busy place like a family gathering, or when you can’t see the speaker clearly because you’re driving, cooking, or walking and talking.

Hearing loss results in:

• Increased listening effort: With less sound information, it’s harder for the brain to recognize sounds. It must fill in the gaps, which requires more listening effort.

• Increased mental load: Having to guess what people are saying and what's happening increases the mental load on the brain and leaves less mental capacity for remembering and performing.

• Increased listening stress: The constant effort to decode speech and fill in the gaps can lead to fatigue, frustration, anxiety, stress, and even social withdrawal.

• Accelerated brain volume shrinkage: All human brains reduce in size with age, but the shrinkage process accelerates when the brain is not getting the auditory input it needs to process speech and sounds (auditory deprivation).

How Your Brain Processes Sound

Did you know that we hear with our brains?

Hearing is a system in which the ears receive sounds and send them to the brain. The brain then translates those sounds into meaning. Our brain decides where to focus, which sounds to listen to, and when to switch focus.

The more information your brain receives, the more material it has at its disposal to translate sound into meaning. This is, for example, what enables you to focus on the conversation you want to hear while filtering out unwanted sounds.

A hearing loss typically means that your brain does not receive as much sound information as it used to. This makes it harder to communicate, which is usually when frustration and/or withdrawal sets in.

Phonemic Awareness Decline: Understanding Speech Sounds

Words are made up of individual speech sounds (phonemes).

/C/a/t/ = Cat vs. /C/a/p/ = Cap

OR

/Ea/s/t = East vs. /Ea/t/ = Eat

(for my phonology friends, no this is not transcribed in IPA!)

With hearing loss, what usually happens is certain individual sounds or parts of the words are not heard, but others are. This may explain why it sounds like someone is not speaking clearly or is mumbling.

If you would like an explanation based on your individual audiogram, we would be happy to explain how this translates to your ears! Just ask!

When hearing loss reduces or blocks sound input, the brain doesn’t just “ignore” those sounds; it actively reorganizes. Over time, the neural circuits that used to process certain frequencies or speech cues can weaken.

This can make it harder to recognize or understand sounds even if they’re later amplified again, especially if the hearing loss has been untreated for a long time.

What "Forgetting" Sounds Really Means

It’s not that your memory of a sound (e.g., “what a dog bark sounds like”) is erased like a file. Instead, reduced fidelity of auditory representations occurs: With less clear input, the brain’s frequency-specific regions in the auditory cortex become less precise.

Studies suggest that neurons that used to respond strongly to certain pitches get less drive and their “tuning” degrades.

Brain Plasticity and the Importance of Early Intervention

Does this mean the associations are gone forever? Not necessarily.

The brain remains plastic:

• Hearing aids and cochlear implants can restore input and, especially when started early, may reverse or mitigate some cortical changes and improve speech understanding.

• Auditory training (listening exercises, speech-in-noise practice) may help retune auditory circuits and improve recognition.

• However, longer durations of untreated loss are linked to poorer outcomes, likely because structural atrophy and cross-modal takeover become more entrenched.

While the “associations” aren’t deleted from your memory, your brain’s ability to efficiently decode and recognize those sounds may degrade. And the longer the deprivation, the harder it can be to fully recover.

Ready to Safeguard Your Hearing and Cognitive Health?

It is my hope that understanding the relationship between hearing loss and cognition, as well as the importance of initiating hearing intervention, will lead to better hearing healthcare outcomes and overall well-being for all our patients and their loved ones.

If you’re noticing hearing difficulty, earlier evaluation and consistent use of amplification (hearing aids, implants when indicated), plus targeted listening practice, may give your brain the best chance to maintain or rebuild those sound-processing networks.

Contact us to schedule your full comprehensive audiometric assessment to learn how we can help you reach your best individual hearing health goals.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: What is auditory deprivation?

A: Auditory deprivation occurs when the brain is deprived of sound input due to untreated hearing loss. Over time, the auditory processing centres of the brain receive less stimulation, which can cause the neural pathways responsible for decoding speech to weaken.

Q: Why do people sound like they are mumbling when I have hearing loss?

A: Hearing loss often affects specific pitch frequencies unequally. When you miss certain phonemes (individual speech sounds) while hearing others, speech seems incomplete or unclear, creating the perception that people are mumbling.

Q: Can wearing hearing aids help my brain adapt to sound again?

A: Yes! Thanks to neuroplasticity, the brain can adapt and reorganize when sound input is restored through hearing aids or cochlear implants. Early intervention yields the best results for restoring clarity and ease of listening.

Sources:

Oticon: It’s Time for A New Perspective in Brain Hearing

Central Plasticity and Dysfunction Elicited by Aural Deprivation in the Critical Period