The brain needs access to all sounds – not just speech – in order to work in a natural way. On this page you can explore the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that are increasing our knowledge of the brain’s role in hearing health and fuelling us to develop life-changing technology for people with hearing loss.
Hearing loss increases the effort of listening. Making sense of what is heard becomes harder, increasing listening stress and mental load. This can lead to fatigue and a tendency to give up when listening becomes challenging.
Increased listening effort
With less sound information, it’s harder for the brain to recognise sounds. It has to fill in the gaps, which requires more listening effort.1
Increased listening stress
Difficulties with following speech can cause listening stress2, triggering a ‘fight or flight’ response that raises the heart rate3, and studies have even show that short periods of stress can have a negative impact on our cognitive abilities.4
Increased mental load
Having to guess what people are saying and what's happening increases the load on the brain and leaves less mental capacity for remembering and performing.5,6
Reorganised brain functionality
Without enough stimulation in the hearing centre, the visual centre and other senses start to compensate, which changes the organisation of the brain.7
When sounds reach the inner ear, they’re converted into neural code inside the cochlea. This information is then transported by the auditory nerve into the hearing centre of the brain – the auditory cortex. Inside the auditory cortex, this neural code becomes meaningful sound objects that can then be further interpreted and analysed by the brain. Two subsystems in the auditory cortex handle these tasks: The Orient subsystem and the Focus subsystem.11,12
STEP 1: Orient
The orient subsystem continuously scans all surrounding sounds – no matter their nature and direction – to create a full perspective of the sound scene.
The orient subsystem depends on good neural code to create an overview of the sound objects and begin separating sounds to determine what is going on in the surroundings. This provides the brain with the best conditions to decide what to focus on and listen to.
STEP 2: Focus
The focus subsystem navigates through the full perspective of the sound scene. It identifies the sound it wants to focus on, listen to, or switch attention to, while the irrelevant sounds are filtered out.
While the two subsystems are responsible for different functions, our hearing depends on how well they work together, because their interaction ensures our present focus is always the most important.11,12
The brain distracts itself on purpose by checking in on the rest of the environment four times every second. This allows our focus to switch if something important appears in the sound scene.
When the two subsystems work well together, the rest of the brain can work optimally, which makes it easier to recognise, store, and recall sounds, and respond to what is happening.
With its directionality, gain reduction, speech prioritisation and traditional compression, conventional hearing aid technology restricts people’s access to the full sound scene.
Not only does this cut people off from their surroundings. It also goes against the brain’s natural way of working, resulting in a limited neural code to the brain, making it harder for the orient subsystem to work properly, which can negatively impact the focus subsystem.
Consequently, conventional hearing care technology contributes to providing a less than optimal sound picture for the brain to hear and understand.
Our goal is to provide the most natural hearing experience. We use the philosophy of BrainHearing to develop technology that provides the brain with access to the full sound environment – because the more sound information the brain has to work with, the better the brain can perform.
At the heart of Oticon BrainHearing™ technology are the three industry-leading MoreSound Technologies: MoreSound Amplifier™, MoreSound Intelligence™, and MoreSound Optimizer™.
Oticon’s hearing aids don’t just improve hearing abilities. They can also benefit the brain and support better wellbeing of people with hearing loss.
We know this because we go above and beyond the competition in the way we conduct research to prove the life-changing benefits associated with using our technology, such as reducing listening effort, increasing memory recall, and reducing listening stress.
To prove the incredible benefits of our technology, we put it to the test in dynamic scenarios that recreate real-life listening environments, using innovative research methods such as EEG testing, pupillometry, VR technology, and pulse monitoring.
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