Twentieth-century neuroscience has discovered something utterly astonishing: specifically that your brain can change itself well into adulthood. Whereas in the early 1900s it was concluded that the brain stopped changing in adolescence, we now acknowledge that the brain reacts to change all through life.
Neuroplasticity
To appreciate how your brain changes, imagine this analogy: visualize your ordinary daily route to work. Now imagine that the route is blocked and how you would react. You wouldn’t just surrender, turn around, and head home; instead, you’d find an alternate route. If that route turned out to be even more efficient, or if the primary route remained closed, the new route would become the new routine.
Identical processes are occurring in your brain when a “regular” function is blocked. The brain reroutes its processing along new paths, and this re-routing process is described as neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity comes in handy for grasping new languages, new talents like juggling, or new healthier behavior. With time, the physical changes to the brain correspond to the new habits and once-challenging tasks become automatic.
Unfortunately, while neuroplasticity can be advantageous, there’s another side that can be detrimental. While learning new skills and healthy habits can make a positive impact on our lives, learning bad habits can have the opposite effect.
Neuroplasticity and Hearing Loss
Hearing loss is one example of how neuroplasticity can have a negative impact. As covered in The Hearing Review, researchers from the University of Colorado found that the segment of the brain devoted to hearing can become reorganized and reassigned to different functions, even with initial-stage hearing loss. This is believed to illuminate the link between hearing loss and cognitive decline.
With hearing loss, the areas of our brain in charge of other functions, like vision or touch, can solicit the under-used areas of the brain responsible for hearing. Because this reduces the brain’s available resources for processing sound, it impairs our capability to comprehend speech.
So, if you have hearing loss and find yourself saying “what was that?” frequently, it’s not only because of the injury to your inner ear—it’s to some extent brought about by the structural changes to your brain.
How Hearing Aids Can Help You
Like most things, there is a both a negative and a positive side to our brain’s potential to change. While neuroplasticity exacerbates the impacts of hearing loss, it also heightens the effectiveness of hearing aids. Your brain can grow new connections, regenerate cells, and reroute neural paths. As a result, enhanced stimulation from hearing aids to the areas of the brain in charge of hearing will stimulate growth and development in this area.
In fact, a recently published long-term study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society determined that using hearing aids limits cognitive decline in people with hearing loss. The study, titled Self-Reported Hearing Loss: Hearing Aids and Cognitive Decline in Elderly Adults: A 25-year Study, observed 3,670 adults age 65 and older over a 25 year time period. The study discovered that the rate of cognitive decline was higher in those with hearing loss as compared to those with normal hearing. But the participants with hearing loss who used hearing aids showed no difference in the rate of cognitive decline when compared to those with normal hearing.
The appeal of this study is that it confirms what we already know concerning neuroplasticity: that the brain will reorganize itself according to its needs and the stimulation it obtains.
Keeping Your Brain Young
In summary, research shows that the brain can change itself all throughout life, that hearing loss can speed up cognitive decline, and that using hearing aids can prevent or reduce this decline.
But hearing aids can achieve even more than that. As stated by brain plasticity expert Dr. Michael Merzenich, you can improve your brain function regardless of age by partaking in challenging new activities, continuing to be socially active, and exercising mindfulness, among other approaches.
Hearing aids can help with this too. Hearing loss tends to make people withdraw socially and can have an isolating effect. But by utilizing hearing aids, you can ensure that you stay socially active and continue to stimulate the sound processing and language regions of your brain.