Dr. Jennifer Groh

If we live long enough, 80% of us will get hearing loss at some point in our lives.

So it's a big problem.

There's certainly concerns that young people are farther along on that trajectory to hearing loss than people from older generations were at a comparable age.

But just because there's, you know, the earbuds are in from morning to night and volume turned up loud enough to block out surrounding sounds, you know, if you're in a loud environment.

I would encourage people to give some consideration to noise-canceling headphones and to not having the volume be turned up too loud.

Right.

You like the full actual speakers?

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

It is possible to make sound that is coming from headphones sound like it is coming from outside.

But to do that, you have to use all three of these sound localization cues.

Things have to have an appropriate timing difference, an appropriate level difference across the two ears, and to use the frequency filtering properties of the ear.

And since everybody's ears are a little bit different, that last step is really hard.

Mm-hmm.

You've got so many wonderful cues to distance in vision, right?

This is a computational process in the brain that we don't fully understand.

And it's worth thinking about what are the available pieces of information that you can use.

Sound is much more bendy than light is.

Bendy, like it bends, right?

It goes around things.