Week 4.1

Question 1

What’s the difference between ear hearing and brain hearing?

Answer 1

Ear hearing is compensating for damage at the level of the ear, while brain hearing is helping the brain to re-;earn how to make sense of the sound it receives

Question 2

What 4 functions does the brain have to do in order to hear

Answer 2

1. orient to different sounds
2. separate the sounds
3. focus on important sounds
4. recognize what the sounds mean

Question 3

How is hearing loss connected to brain size?

Answer 3

• those w/long term HL lost 1cm3 more brain tissue than those w/o
• cognitive decline with HL 30-40% faster than those w/o
• mild/moderate/severe HL were 3/4/5x more likely to develop dementia

Question 4

What is binaural processing?

Answer 4

The idea that it is important to use both ears, coordinated, to maintain localization and head shadow effect

Question 5

What is bandwidth

Answer 5

The distance between the smallest and largest frequencies. We want a big bandwidth.

Question 6

What are the three stages of Oticon’s feedback shield?

Answer 6

1. PHASE INVERSION: detect feedback, impose mirrored signal to cancel
2. FREQUENCY SHIFT: input comes in, output shifted 10-20 Hz to break loop
3. GAIN MANAGEMENT: only when first 2 fail, turn down gain

Question 7

What is Oticon’s prescriptive formula?

Answer 7

V.A.C.: Voice aligned compression, aims to optimize speech comprehension and maintain sound quality