Noam Hassenfeld

It's something called hidden hearing loss.

Basically...

In your ear, there's fibers that respond to soft sounds and there's fibers that respond to loud sounds.

So that means there's fibers that respond to whispers or kind of the ASMR stuff.

And then there's fibers that really get activated if you're crossing the street or near an airplane or a vacuum cleaner or something.

And on a hearing test, what they do is they put you in this soundproof room.

The audiologist sits next to you, says, raise your hand whenever you can hear a beep.

And the beep gets softer and softer and softer until you can't hear the beep.

And what they're doing is just testing the soft fibers.

They're just testing if you can hear the quietest possible noise.

And if you can hear the quietest possible noise, they say, hey, your hearing's fine.

But that doesn't test damage that could happen to the loud fibers.

And you can see what happens to people who have damage to loud fibers if you're in a restaurant and notice that you can't understand the person across from you.

It might be loud, might be in a bar or something.

But if you're in a quiet room, you'll have no problem hearing the conversation.

What's happening there is you have damage in your louder fibers, and that damage is not gonna show up on a hearing test.

But that damage could lead to tinnitus.

That's the type of hidden hearing loss that could end up leading to tinnitus.

I mean, come on.

Like, we don't need a scientist to tell us they need to turn the music down at a restaurant.