To Lose An Ear Analysis

To Lose an Ear

By Suzannah Hitsman

Hearing; it’s not something people probably think about a lot unless they are having a problem with it, but what ipf one morning someone wakes up a realizes that their hearing is getting worse and worse; they find themselves turning up the volume on what they are listening to and always asking “What, could you repeat that?”. It could happen to anyone really not just the elderly. If someone goes to a public place and looks around they will probably see a lott of teens wearing ear buds. Earbuds have become extremely popular and if misused can be destructive to your hearing. Some might think that it’s not that big of deal but audiologists, or experts on of sound and how the ear works say otherwise, But why

The sound waves must first be funneled into the, ear canal by the pinna or the outer ear into the ear canal and then hit the eardrum which vibrates. Those vibrations then transfer through a series of the three tiniest bone in your body into the cochlea. The cochlea has many little “hairs” as they are called (they are not really hairs), are disturbed by the vibrations that entered the cochlea. Those little hairs in your cochlea can never regrow and when you listen to music too loud you are killing those little hairs. When those little hairs die it is called; noise induced hearing loss or NIHL. But what is noise induced hearing loss one might ask themselves, and the answer is simple; noise induced hearing loss is when someone has been exposed to too loud of a sound for a prolonged amount of time for the sound to damage your inner ear resulting in deafness, a ringing in the ears, or for everything to be muffled. There are two main things that can cause noise induced hearing loss include; extremely loud sounds all at once or a sound above 85 decibels multiple

Having earbuds stuck into someones ear canal can makes sounds louder by up to 9 decibels, (teenshealth.org). Everyone knows that not all ear damaging sounds are avoidable. Though there are some sources of hearing loss that are unavoidable most of the sound causing NIHL is completely optional. A main factor to hearing loss that is caused by sound is your personal listening devices hooked up to earbuds, (Scutti,2015). So people should cut down on optional sounds especially the ones that could cause noise induced hearing loss, like earbuds which deliver harsher more harmful sound waves almost directly to the cochlea, even with the volume at lower levels,