If you are like the average person, you’ve waited seven years before getting hearing aids.  Seven years!

When years pass by without hearing some sounds (such as high-pitch sounds), the brain changes.

Here is what we think happens:  if you have a high-pitch hearing loss, you won’t be able to hear soft high-pitch sounds. The area of the brain that processes soft, high-pitch sounds is not being used.  So, the brain assigns this area a new task—such as processing the middle pitches. An analogy is:  if you keep breaking your drinking glasses in the dishwasher, and they don’t get replaced, the empty space in your cupboard will soon become filled with other items—because there is room for them.

So, when you get hearing aids, the high pitches once again become audible.  But, in essence, this signal has nowhere to go.  (We need to make room in the cupboard!) The brain has to re-organize again, and “make some space” for the new high-pitch sounds that are coming in.

The brain needs consistent input to make these changes.  If people don’t wear their new hearing aids all the time, brain reorganization won’t take place.  And until these brain changes do take place, you really can’t know how well your hearing aids work for you.

Hearing aids will sound unnatural, tinny, and/or echoey until you “get used to them.”  Now we know that “getting used to them” is mostly about brain re-organization.  And this does happen!

As an audiologist, I learned to say:  Let’s just hold off before adjusting for the tininess and unnaturalness.  It might just disappear. At first, this took courage for me to say.  It was important because if I adjusted the hearing aids to respond to complaints about unnatural sounding, tinny hearing aids, the result was less high-pitch amplification.  The more adjustments I made, the further I was getting away from the algorithms and prescriptive fittings that are based on the person’s hearing loss. You hear better if you are receiving all the high-pitch amplification that your hearing loss requires.