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Auditory training - any tips?

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Imagine consulting a running expert on “How to do a marathon” and all you’re provided with are: running shows, shorts and a fitness watch. “Off you go, good luck with your marathon!” Training? Naah, no need - you just got the best running shoes the world has to offer!

I feel like this is what almost all audiologists do these days: sell you stuff and program it a couple of times. A piece of hardware, tweaking the software, best of luck. But what about our brains, the sound processing, speech recognition? From my very own experience, and from reading a lot on Reddit, it seems almost EVERYONE struggles with speech-in-noise. MANY hate conversations in groups where people talk simultaneously, interrupt each other, etc. Yes, our ears struggle with certain frequencies. And hearing aids help amplify them. But we all also seem to have issues with the processing in our brain and I don’t find much help on that front.

There are some free apps but I haven’t found something usefull, yet. I heard about LACE but they want (if I recall correctly) 450 $ (!!). My audiologist had no recommendation. So now it’s up to the internet:

Is there something out there - scientifically proven - that helps me train my brain? I want to understand speech better. I want to struggle less in noisy environments. I want to enjoy restaurant visits and group conversations again. I want to be able to follow conversations without laser focus.

I just lately stumbled upon “Eargym” (in the Android Playstore (make sure to write as one word!)). Is there more?

//KarlTheodor

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LACE is the program I use daily to train myself to understand speech better and improve my memory. It has an easy to use feature to add voices for training. I added my wife’s voice because she is the most difficult for me to understand.

I’ve been using it for a month and can see improvements in my speech recognition and short term memory.

Here is a link to the Neurotone16 website if you are interested.

It is on the expensive side, but you can find discounts. I used the discount offered by Dr Cliff when I made my purchase:

  • Discount Code: DRCLIFF

  • Savings: $170 OFF

Edited

It seems like you actually can purchase Lace outside the US, Canado and the UK. I was in contact with Neurotone, the company behind Lace AI. They told me I could purchase a license through them directly if there isn’t a clinic in my vicinity. I have not stumbled upon a lot of online reviews yet (thanks Mikejl for your insight!), so I am hesitant to go ahead and make the purchase. If it works, I would absolutely buy it - bad hearing is my no 1 issue and it affects both my private and professional life. But I’d like to hear from people that have used it for a longer period first and hear if it actually led to a significant improvement.

It seems to me that following a conversation in noise, or following two or more dialogues at the same time are skills that are acquired over time by people who can hear well. The hearing-impaired are simply not that focused on, or trained in the advanced processing of auditory information. In other words, our difficulties in those situations can, imho, not be overcome with sound processing but require (brain) training.

@karltheodor1st said:

Is there something out there - scientifically proven - that helps me train my brain?

Well this is the crux. One of the reasons that auditory training isn’t widely provided by audiologists is that the research supporting its efficacy is overall pretty weak.

There are certainly bodies moving in to try to monetize the weak positive evidence. Lace for example, proposed that the reason we should provide their product to our patients was that it could increase our profit by 30k a year simply by spreading a 60k cost increase across our patient base and then paying 30k to them and taking the other 30k for ourselves. The patients would benefit from having universal access to their app with no affordable option for providing it only to patients who might use or need or want it.

Auditory training seems like a good idea. It’s something we all want to work (which certainly add a certain risk of bias to the general opinion of its efficacy). It doesn’t have any negative side effects other than financial. But then. . . is an hour of listening to random sentences in contrived noise at home on an app going to help you more, from a wholistic perspective, than going to a coffee shop with a friend? You could even frame it as listening practice with your friend–”I need to practice listening in noise, let’s go find new places in the city where I can practice listening to you.” Compared to interacting with an ‘trainer’, I suspect it would have knock-on benefits to that social isolation stuff we’re all worried about impacting our dementia risks.

I too suffered, and to a certain extent, still suffer from the use-it-or-lose-it syndrome.

I bought a TV streamer which streams the TV audio to my hearing aid and watched and listened with TV captions, still do. I even leave the TV streamer ON if I nap in my TV chair (and don’t see the TV captions) hoping that my subconscious will train my remaining auditory brain cells.

Over time, I do find myself relying less and less on the TV captions, although I still double check my word understanding with the TV captions sometimes. I also find that my word understanding has improved in noisy grocery stores and in traffic noise in the car (less and less trouble conversing with my wife in those noisy hearing situations)

I am still improving, but this TV streamer approach does work for me :slightly_smiling_face:

Edited

How is “auditory training” supposed to compensate for the brain simply receiving distorted signal, lacking the sound processing by outer hair cells, lacking some frequencies, having loudness crudely compressed by hearing aids? The approach sounds as if hearing aids were doing the whole job and it were up to the ungrateful brain to decode the signal.

With a cochlear implant, the brain accommodates for a much more impoverished signal.

But your point isn’t unreasonable. It’s similar to when I was constantly getting aggravated by public perception of oticon’s “brain hearing" marketing as meaning that the hearing aid wasn’t doing much and they were “leaving it up to your brain" when in reality the hearing aids were doing a huge amount of heavy lifting and “brain hearing" just represents oticon’s philosophy of how they decide how to implement their features.

It’s a combination. The damaged cochlea needs support, but the auditory system is plastic and better function there also helps. But if you’re asking what the limits are there versus opportunities–we just have no idea. It’s a small research community and it doesn’t progress quickly. Anecdotally, I feel like I saw changes in the auditory processing skills of normal hearing individuals during the pandemic with such dramatically reduced complex listening (i.e. Everyone just staying home). Although I suppose that was confounded by people actually getting covid, which in many cases had lingering cognitive effects.

Need to interject a pertinent thought here. As a long time hearing loss, short time user, it recently became obvious that while my hearing aids help, my lip reading has improved quite a bit. You may know that lip reading is to some extent, a sub-conscious evolution.

So IMHO practicing hearing via face to face encounters to improve understanding, while it may have the desired effect, the reason for the improvement my not lie solely with the method of practice, but may be combined with improved lip reading.

Nick

Time & patience were the keys to success for me.

After some time, neuroadaptation will help tremendously with problematic sounds. To simplify: The brain “hears” the new sounds from the hearing devices and figures out new pathways to compensate so that you can now understand.

To speed things along, my low-tech (free) method was to frequently listen to various talk radio stations and to listen to television with closed captions off while not looking at the people speaking (to avoid lip reading). Listening to a wide range of voices helped. I also challenged myself with various environments as often as possible. (Noisy, quiet, voices from behind, voices from all directions at once…)

And music helped speed things along quite a bit. I listen to classical and opera so that a wide variety of frequencies are sent to the brain.

Although I haven’t tried it yet, Angel Sound that Earnest Klein linked seems very promising.

I hope that one or more of these will help you!
Paul

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