[cm2187]

And I am in the opposite position. I can’t hear a voice in any noisy environment, even when everyone else seems to hear it fine. So I went to do some test and was told by the doctor that my hearing was absolutely fine, that it has to do with the ability of my brain to process sounds...

[elbasti]

West earplugs! I know this sounds counterintuitive but bear with me. This knowledge changed my life.

So, there is a deep misconception about what it is to "hear", even among doctors; perhaps this can help you.

A quick primer on how the ear works, in an eli5 way: in order to have a large dynamic range, all inner ear cells are "tuned" to be responsive at different volumes. (The response curve of any one cell is like an S, which means it is exquisitely tuned to a very narrow volume range. Anything quieter than this and the response is 0, anything higher and it saturates). Your brain then ignores anything that is "saturated". This allows you to hear both a cricket and a person talking next to you, sounds that are about 1000 times louder/quieter.

And your ear has a _lot_ of these cells, which together cover the entire volume range, which for humans is many orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately, when hearing gets "damaged", what happens is that the cells tuned for higher volumes are permanently saturated, _so the brain ignores them_.

The worse the damage, the lower the volumes that are stuck "open".

So then imagine being in a loud restaurant. The cells that fire for the volume of conversation are "saturated" so the brain ignores them, and all sounds are perceived as being equally "loud"--the world sounds muddled.

The solution, paradoxically, is to lower the volume of _everything_ (by wearing earplugs), which puts the conversion volumes back in the area where you have dynamic range remaining.

If you don't believe me, try it out by just covering your ears with your fingers next time you are at a restaurant--the conversation should be clearer.

Sidenote: the problem with hearing tests is that they test "the lowest volume you can perceive"--assuming that if you can hear a quiet thing, you can hear a loud one. But this isn't how hearing loss manifests itself among most people; we can hear quiet, we can hear loud, we just can't tell them apart!

[jorvi]

I have the same. I’m really bad at following a group conversation if we’re in a bar or something. However, if we ordered some take-out afterwards I can usually hear the scooter coming in from 1-2 streets away (through closed windows), I know 5 minutes beforehand if the DHL/mailman is coming because I can hear his beep gun one street over, etc.

It can actually get fairly annoying because if for example I’m crashing at someone’s place and the inactive speakers have a very faint hum/buzz, I can pick that up but the person I’d tell it to thinks I’m mad and am imagining things.

I also echo the parent post in that I often hear people’s EQ being bad and it can be a mild effort to not be an elitist snob and correct it for them / tell them its wrong. Hell, often if they allow me to either EQ it to neutral or V-shaped they still dislike it to their own settings (which is cool and at that point I just let it be).

[fouc]

I bet you can re-train the brain on how to hear for that. Could be you've trained the brain one way (maybe too much white noise exposure) and now you need to train it back.

[iscrewyou]

Exactly. I learned to find different instruments in songs by watching YouTube videos of producers putting a song together. Now it’s much easier for me to pick up that mellow instrument way way in the background of a hook.