When you’re born with hearing loss, your brain develops a little differently than it normally would. Is that surprising to you? That’s because we commonly have false ideas about brain development. You may think that only injury or trauma can change your brain. But brains are in fact more dynamic than that.
Hearing Affects Your Brain
The majority of people have heard that when one sense decreases the others become more powerful. The well-known example is always vision: your senses of smell, taste, and hearing will become stronger to compensate for loss of vision.
That hasn’t been proven in the medical literature, but like all good myths, there could be a sliver of truth in there somewhere. Because hearing loss, for example, can and does change the sensory architecture of your brain. At least we know that occurs in children, how much we can extrapolate to adults is uncertain.
The physical structure of children’s brains, who have hearing loss, has been demonstrated by CT scans to change, changing the hearing centers of the brain to visual centers.
The newest studies have gone on to discover that the brain’s architecture can be impacted by even moderate loss of hearing.
How Hearing Loss Changes The Brain
A specific amount of brainpower is devoted to each sense when they are all functioning. A certain amount of brain space goes towards interpreting touch, a certain amount towards hearing or vision, and so on. When your young, your brain is extremely flexible and that’s when these pathways are being formed and this architecture is being set up.
It’s already been verified that the brain altered its architecture in children with high degrees of hearing loss. The space that would in most cases be devoted to hearing is instead reconfigured to better help with visual perception. The brain gives more power and space to the senses that are delivering the most input.
Changes With Minor to Moderate Loss of Hearing
Children who have minor to moderate hearing loss, surprisingly, have also been observed to show these same rearrangements.
These brain alterations won’t produce superpowers or substantial behavioral changes, to be clear. Instead, they simply appear to help individuals adjust to hearing loss.
A Relationship That Has Been Strong For a Long Time
The research that hearing loss can change the brains of children definitely has repercussions beyond childhood. The vast majority of individuals living with hearing loss are adults, and the hearing loss in general is often a direct result of long-term noise or age-related damage. Is hearing loss changing their brains, too?
Noise damage, according to evidence, can actually cause inflammation in particular areas of the brain. Other evidence has linked untreated hearing loss with higher risks for anxiety, dementia, and depression. So while it’s not certain whether the other senses are enhanced by hearing loss we are sure it alters the brain.
Individuals from around the US have anecdotally borne this out.
The Affect of Hearing Loss on Your Overall Health
It’s more than superficial insight that hearing loss can have such an important impact on the brain. It reminds us all of the relevant and intrinsic relationships between your senses and your brain.
When loss of hearing develops, there are usually significant and recognizable mental health impacts. So that you can be prepared for these consequences you need to be aware of them. And the more educated you are, the more you can take steps to preserve your quality of life.
How much your brain physically changes with the onset of hearing loss will depend on many factors (including how old you are, older brains commonly firm up that architecture and new neural pathways are more difficult to establish as a result). But regardless of your age or how severe your loss of hearing is, untreated hearing loss will definitely have an effect on your brain.
