Hearing Loss LIVE! What We Learned Hearing vs Understanding

Hearing and understanding are two different things. With hearing loss, we hear sound but may not be able to understand it,  or where the sound came from. Let's stop the "what"! Let's work on better understanding of hearing loss for all!

Read our post on Hearing vs Understanding:
https://hearinglosslive.com/hearing-vs-understanding/

For a transcript of this post, go to our BuzzSprout site:
https://hearinglosslivepodcast.buzzsprout.com/

#HearingVsUnderstanding #HearingLoss #What #Communication #HearingLossLIVE #podcast

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

hearing, chelle, understanding, julia, multitask, talking, brain, thought, information, present, process, ear, people, workshop, classes, rephrase, communication, stop, attention, loss

SPEAKERS

Chelle, Julia Stepp

Hearing Loss LIVE! What we learned with hearing versus understanding.

Julia: Good morning and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! We want to remind you if you're enjoying our information on our blogs, our YouTube page and or our Buzzsprout please please remember to share, like, subscribe, let us know what it means to you what you've learned what you'd like to have more of. We are also found on buy me a coffee where we have a fundraiser going for our live captioning that we use for our monthly Let's talk. We have an email newsletter that we'd love to have you sign up for you can get all this information at hearinglosslive.com, take a check-- take a look at check our class schedules that will be coming up in April we'll start posting dates and times for those. We do have pre-recorded stuff which once you purchase is yours to do as with to do with as you like, Julia's already tongue twisted today, imagine that. This month, we have talked about hearing versus understanding. And we thought this would be a very small topic of fun that has turned into pages and pages of notes and thoughts and questions. And really something that needs to be discussed more with each other with our hearing partners, or even think with our audiology specialists or hearing instrument specialists. Because hearing and understanding actually are two different things. Chelle I'm going to turn it over to you on some thoughts because we seem to always find we're on the same wavelength on what we're we're talking about. And you know, in my mind, I thought hearing and understanding were synonyms, like would mean something-- and after we did research with Webster's dictionary and ChatGPT and just talking to each other, absolutely has nothing to do with one another. Share more on that.

Chelle: ChatGPT is something I use just because it pulls together information so fast. I asked ChatGPT what is the process for understanding. Understanding involves several cognitive processes. Initially, sensory organs collect information, which is then transmitted to the brain. The brain processes the information by connecting it with existing knowledge forming an association and identifying patterns. Cognitive functions like attention, memory, reasoning play a crucial role. Ultimately, understanding emerges when the brain integrates new information into coherent, into a coherent framework, allowing individuals to comprehend interpret, and make sense of input received. What I liked about this definition that ChatGPT gave me is that it says sensory organs collect information. That's not just the ears that the eyes and even feeling things and stuff like that. So communication and understanding comes from several different ways, not just our hearing, and we tend to forget that. So I asked ChatGPT again, how does the brain process sound.? The brain processes sound through a complex series of steps. Firstl the ear captures the sound waves and converts them to electrical signals. These signals then travel to the auditory cortex in the brain nerve. In the auditory cortex, the brain interprets and organizes the information allowing us to perceive and understand the various attributes of sound such as pitch, volume and location. So it is it is different processing the sound. It trips me out. It goes because I studied the ear for a little bit. And the ear is designed to collect the sound and it goes through the eardrum and the eardrum vibrates and hits the little bones, the little bones then send a signal into the cochlea, and it goes through the cochlea. And -- oh, my God, it's amazing that we hear as fast as we do. And I remember reading a while back something about how long it takes to process, just the sound. As in it's not as instant as we think. I'd already happened before we've processed it. So another very interesting thought there.

Julia: That is huge. Hold on, because I'm going to use my glasses. Sorry, apologize for the shine. Because I don't think we think about how long-- let's see one of the articles I came up with, let me see if I can find it. If something like we hear three words, let's see, well, I'm in the wrong spot. Imagine that. So let me start with Webster's definition of hear, right? To perceive or become aware of by the ear. Their first example was, didn't hear what she said. Though I heard them leave. So you heard a sound. But it doesn't mean you understood the sound. To gain knowledge, of by hearing, heard that you were ill. To me, none of these are about understanding these are about terminology we use to talk about hearing. would not hear my side of the story doesn't mean I didn't understand it means I wouldn't listen. That's to heed. That's one of the things I just I thought for sure they were synonyms. And I remember thinking, after I got done with they understand, to grasp the meaning of. When you hear something, you don't understand it till you grasp the meaning of to grasp the reasonableness of, his behavior is hard to understand. But if you don't understand why they're asking you this question that you're hearing, you're not grasping what's the reasonable reason they are asking me this? And then it goes into some under, you know, understanding cognitive stuff. I got on this whole research the brain thing, because we actually had an HLAA meeting discussion with an audiologist about the fact that when did we think, gosh, I don't know if I said it in workshop. When the question was, when did we think when did audiology see hearing aids would hear as fast as normal hearing happens, which was in macro seconds, right? Macro seconds. So think about that. Your hearing aid is still macro seconds behind what you would hear with normal hearing, which means those macro seconds add up into the understanding of what it was you heard, Changing that into was it speech? Was it a bird? Was it a? Was it a, you know, passing car? Is it water on the road? The brain itself has to keep up with people speaking at a rate of about three words a second. So that means it's got to distinguish, and this is probably not your speed talker, this is just your average Joe talking is three words a second. While you're filtering out road noise. While you're filtering out background noise. While-- and this is just, you know, for normal, this is normal hearing situations. So there really is a difference in hearing versus understanding. And it's very important. Again, get our workshop, take one of our classes, we really, really try to drive in how important the three golden rules are for understanding. This is not just for people with hearing loss, this can be used with everybody, and everybody can use it with each other for better under standing, it's not just about better hearing, it's about better understanding Get my attention. If you don't have my attention, even though I don't have a hearing loss. Chelle and I were talking just before the podcast, and she's telling me to do something, and I'm over here, writing a note, looking at my phone at an email and realize, I have no idea what she just told me to do. I heard her. I heard some of the words, but I didn't understand what it is she was asking me to do. Stop and pay attention to each other, face each other. Make sure you're seeing those facial cues. That was one of our big research things that happen. Not just hearing loss people depend on visual cues, hearing individuals to do as well, every buddy depends on those cues. Now, that's where you have to know if you've understood the cue, and does it match what is being said. And that's how you can sometimes help yourself with better lipreading even. And be within six feet. Because after six feet, I'm getting more noise that's going on extraneously around me versus your voice coming straight out me. And stop the what. Stop the what has become a real big one for me lately. I think we do it automatically. And maybe this was in our Tuesday night talk. Someone said this, I find myself saying what before I've actually started to understand what it is they're saying, because I haven't waited a second to try to put it all together. So now I've said what and they're repeating themselves when they really didn't need to repeat themselves. I just needed to take a second and put together what I could and then ask for rephrase. Something along those lines. Am I crazy? Did that happen on Tuesday? Or is this something else that happened with one of my classes?

Chelle: We're teaching a lot of classes, [laughter] we did a workshop, so I can't even tell you how things are starting to blend.

Julia: Give us some more thoughts on what you learned this month. I think for me with the stop the what was such a huge thing.

Chelle: Stopping in the what is very big. Because like you just said, I used to say what out of habit before I finished processing that. And by the time they started repeating. I was like, Oh, I got it now. [laughter] That's why I learned to wait for it, which is what we discussed in our last video. I think with hearing loss, like some one of our students said she said I think everybody with hearing loss needs to be present. That's the person with a hearing loss because we need to be there to focus. And that's the person speaking to us. But in fact, just a nice concept anyway. Shouldn't we all be present with each other when we're talking? We've gotten some bad habits in the last many years  and lost a lot of social graces. We've talked about that in the past too. And it'll probably come up again. On the topic of hearing versus understanding one of the things I really liked, and that seemed to catch on while on the workshop was that we have distorted hearing. We have I hear, I hear a lot. I just can't understand what I hear. So I can see where I'm not hearing certain frequencies. And that distorts the hearing. I know you're talking but unless you do those three golden rules like Julia, I'm not gonna understand you. Like Julia said. So distorted hearing is the sens- sensorineural hearing loss and we have a website, on our website we have a blog post on that giving you visuals of what's that that's like. Because it makes understanding very, very hard. And being present is a must for us. Three words to process a second. I'm laughing about that. Yeah, we got to learn to let go of some of those words and focus on some of the words we can and change what was it you said I had another thought it ricocheted against the other thought and I now lost everything. I think I'll stop right there for now until I remember.

Julia: My brains not working any faster than yours, I don't think. I like the present because of being present for something. Another thought that came up. We had a student mention in one of our classes was, there's been many, many studies that though we pretend we can multitask, nobody can multitask. If you're multitasking, your brain has turned some other portion off for you to do whatever it is the other task is. So though we think we're multitasking, we're not. And I think it's not fair to kind of say-- I guess maybe not that you, kay let me put this right. Oftentimes, Chelle, you will say to me, hearing loss means I can't multitask. So I can only do one thing at a time. But the truth is, and then I think hearing people use that against people with hearing loss. So I think we, that's another stop that stop apologizing for that. No, I'm going to focus on what I need to, to have the best communication outcome with you. And I think hearing people could stop the multitask and start having better communication by focusing on one thing at a time, and I'm guilty of it. I'm I'm the queen of multitask. Right. Chelle's rolling her eyes. I just had to make sure people on Buzzsprout know that because I'm really bad at it. And then something drops every time right, I forget something. I didn't finish something. I thought this was done. And it wasn't. So you know, throw some age in there, too. I've been blaming my age on why I can't multitask. Truth is I may have never really done it well, before. I just did autopilot. I don't know. And I don't know that's but but there is research that is true. So maybe we need to stop the multitask and be in the present for those that we want better communication in general. Before we close out, did your thought, come back?

Chelle: No, I didn't. But being present, does help understanding a whole whole lot. And if you think about it, there's less repeating if you're present, and you're wasting less time. So make sure you're present with us to help increase our understanding.

Julia: Exactly. And I think with us being present, we can see what your understanding and what you're not an enable to help rephrase so that we don't have to have, you know, poor communication outcomes. All right. I appreciate y'all. Again, remember to like, subscribe and share any and all of our content, let us know what you'd like to see more of. We will start our new blog next week and it will be I'm trying to remember how to say it. Incidental hearing, sorry, I was trying to figure out what order to say it in. It's called incidental hearing. Very interesting subject that we were like, floating around and now we have like three pages of notes again. So lots of content. If you haven't signed up for our talk about it, Let's Talk Tuesday. It will be March 5th at 6pm Mountain Time, adjust for your own timezone, but sign up today. Reach out to us at info@hearinglosslive.com or you can get a hold of us on our hearinglosslive.com website there is a form you can fill out. Hope to see you then! 

Bye!