Your brain develops in a different way than it normally would if you’re born with loss of hearing. Does that surprise you? That’s because we often think about brains in the wrong way. Your mind, you tell yourself, is a static thing: it only changes because of trauma or damage. But the reality is that brains are somewhat more…dynamic.
Hearing Affects Your Brain
The majority of people have heard that when one sense diminishes the others become more powerful. Vision is the most well known instance: your senses of hearing, taste, and smell will become stronger to compensate for loss of vision.
There might be some truth to this but it hasn’t been established scientifically. Because hearing loss, for example, can and does alter the sensory architecture of your brain. At least we know that happens in children, how much we can extrapolate to adults is an open question.
The physical structure of children’s brains, who suffer from hearing loss, has been demonstrated by CT scans to change, transforming the part of the brain usually responsible for interpreting sounds to instead be more sensitive to visual information.
The newest studies have gone on to discover that the brain’s architecture can be influenced by even slight loss of hearing.
How The Brain is Changed by Hearing Loss
A certain amount of brainpower is committed to each sense when they are all working. The interpretation of touch, or taste, or vision and so on, all make use of a specific amount of brain space. When your young, your brain is extremely pliable and that’s when these pathways are being formed and this architecture is being set up.
Conventional literature had already confirmed that in children with total or near-total hearing loss, the brain modified its overall structure. The space that would in most cases be dedicated to hearing is instead reconfigured to boost visual perception. The brain devotes more space and more power to the senses that are offering the most input.
Modifications With Mild to Moderate Hearing Loss
What’s unexpected is that this same rearrangement has been discovered in children with minor to medium loss of hearing also.
These brain modifications won’t result in superpowers or significant behavioral changes, to be clear. Alternatively, they simply appear to help people adapt to hearing loss.
A Long and Strong Relationship
The research that loss of hearing can change the brains of children certainly has repercussions beyond childhood. Hearing loss is frequently a result of long term noise related or age related hearing damage meaning that most people who suffer from it are adults. Is loss of hearing changing their brains, too?
Noise damage, according to evidence, can actually cause inflammation in particular areas of the brain. Hearing loss has been linked, according to other evidence, with higher chances for dementia, depression, and anxiety. So while we haven’t confirmed hearing loss boosts your other senses, it does affect the brain.
That’s borne out by anecdotal evidence from people across the US.
The Affect of Hearing Loss on Your General Health
That hearing loss can have such an enormous effect on the brain is more than basic superficial information. It calls attention to all of the essential and intrinsic relationships between your senses and your brain.
When hearing loss develops, there are commonly significant and recognizable mental health effects. Being mindful of those impacts can help you be prepared for them. And the more prepared you are, the more you can take the appropriate steps to protect your quality of life.
How much your brain physically changes with the onset of hearing loss will depend on many factors ((age is a major factor because older brains have a tougher time creating new neural pathways). But regardless of your age or how extreme your loss of hearing is, neglected hearing loss will absolutely have an effect on your brain.