HOW MUCH TIME IS NEEDED TO ADAPT TO A HEARING AID?
While each person’s experience will vary, hearing aids allow a person to experience certain sounds they have not heard in a long time. Imagine living half way back into a cave and becoming accustom to the dim lighting over several years. If this person was taken outside, into the bright sunshine, it would be uncomfortable and that person would prefer to go back into the dim lighting. This person would need to slowly acclimatize to normal lighting and may not like normal lighting at first. Improving communication with a hearing aid is a gradual acclimatization and relearning process that does not happen at the moment of hearing aid fitting. Relearning and acclimatization takes place in the central auditory nervous system and not in the ear itself. During which time the brain learns to recognize and focus in on important auditory information and learn to ignore and block out what is not important. Recent experiments suggest that a listener’s ability to comprehend speech may continue to i
Each person’s experience will vary; hearing aids may allow a person to experience certain sounds they had never heard before (or at least for some time). Relearning takes place in the central auditory nervous system and not in the ear itself. Recent experiments suggest that a listener’s ability to comprehend speech may continue to increase over a period of several months when wearing a new amplification system. This process is termed acclimatization.
