2024-08-25 10:48:39
How do you manage hearing loss when you are deaf? Through lip-reading, the use of hearing aids, and also through certain adaptations, Thomas Marissal, himself a deaf mute and neuroscience researcher, demonstrated this. The reward is partial, but the important thing is to keep a sense of humor! Researchers conclude.
Have you ever tried blindfolding yourself and then licking a board to guess the colors and shapes? Have you ever held your nose before putting a piece of old Camembert to your ear and smelling it? Perhaps you find that these questions come from an eccentric, even slightly crazy mind?
However, I use my senses in the wrong way every day. I assure you there is nothing wrong with my mental health! Indeed, I was born deaf, and I hear with my eyes, while my ears serve mainly a decorative purpose.
have Various forms of deafness This may be due to a defect in the sensory organs or brain. In my case, the problem was in the innermost part of the ear, the snail-like structure called the cochlea.
Normally, the latter converts sounds into signals that the brain can understand, acting like a kind of translator. In my case, the cochlea no longer performs its function. She translated French into yogurt! Result: Hearing loss 90 decibels.
The different structures of the outer, middle and inner ears.
Aparna Arasaratnam, CC BY-SA
To give you an idea of what it stands for, know that 90 decibels corresponds to the sound level produced by a speaker. With such a hearing loss, you can play as loud as you want, and there’s no way I’d be woken by the sound of the trumpet: the noise produced by the instrument is below my perception threshold.
“Listen” with lip reading and hearing aids
Indeed, if my ears are bad, my eyes are fine. Well, that’s pretty much it, since I’m also color blind. Just a reminder, color blindness Impairs color vision, especially red and green.
I know, I accumulate them…but despite this little problem with color reception, my eyesight is pretty good. I use this to read your lips when you speak.
So how does this work? lip reading ? It enables deaf people to distinguish images of 12 of the 36 phonemes in French.
Being alone is not enough. But it also plays a large part beyond the sound we perceive, the interpretation of the context, and this context. And sound, whether it’s perceived by my ears or my eyes, it’s really my auditory cortex that’s processing it.
Here’s an everyday example to illustrate this paradox: If my 5-year-old son talks to me without my hearing aids on, I can’t feel any sound coming from his lips.
But when I read the movements of his mouth, it was his voice that I felt in my skull. When I think about this inaudible conversation with him, his voice is forever etched in my memory. At least the way I hear sounds changes when I wear hearing aids.
To compensate for my poor sound perception, my hearing aids use cutting-edge technology that not only amplifies, but transforms the sounds I hear least into the sounds I hear best, often more severely.
So the way my wife and I perceive our son’s voice is different from the way we see the color green. To sum up, I am also a bit color blind…
When the auditory cortex processes visual information…
My brain tries to adapt to the situation. He tinkered, showed plasticity. What is brain plasticity? This may refer to a compensatory phenomenon that the brain develops to balance missing information.
One of the most striking cases is Evelyn Glennie : Deaf since the age of 12, she is an accomplished musician who claims to feel sound through the vibrations of her body.
However, we all have the ability to learn from our experiences: brain plasticity is not exclusive to people with disabilities. In this regard, I would like to correct a fairly common prejudice: it is not necessarily our lack of awareness that other people are over-developed.
Deaf Resilience: Saw it on TV!
In movies or series we most often find visually impaired characters with extraordinary hearing. The most famous of which is “Daredevil”The blind superhero in the American Marvel comics.
We Deaf people have our own superheroes: Sue Thomas, FBI Eyes In the series of the same name, he lost his hearing at a young age. In the first episode, we see her back at the FBI, very proud. She is then disillusioned when she realizes that she was hired just to fill a disability quota and that the prestigious institution reserved only menial jobs for her.
Fortunately, handsome Bobby soon realizes that she has an extraordinary gift: excellent lip reading skills that allow her to understand people from far away. This ability comes in handy when stopping bad guys and discovering that Bobby’s wife has been unfaithful to him.
In fact, few are as strong as Sue Thomas. For me, in order to read lips well, I have to be in front of the interlocutor and not far away from him. If several people are talking to me at the same time, I get lost quickly.
Work harder for the same result
As I’ve written before, lip-reading alone isn’t enough. I can only partially compensate for the hearing loss with my eyes. Also, I have a hard time appreciating music: you can’t see it. Likewise, I couldn’t identify any known tune, not even the “La Marseillaise”.
And, generally speaking, when I commit to a task, I have to work harder to achieve the same result. This isn’t unique to me, it’s even a documented phenomenon among people with disabilities, called «Limp Time». To illustrate the burden of time lost due to my disability, I will use the example of English, which I must be fluent in as a researcher.
I had to learn the language three times: written, spoken and lip-reading. Even worse, I noticed that the lips don’t move exactly the same way if the person is American, British, or… Chewbacca ” Star Wars “.
Strengthens areas of the brain responsible for speech
My school wasn’t always a walk in the park, neither for listening to the lectures (“Did the teacher talk about entropy or entropy?”) or for interacting with the girls (Jessica did – she said “I want to “You kiss me” or “I want you to learn breaststroke”)? There, I had to learn to read the context better (there was no swimming pool near Jessica).
I think something happened around 20 years old. At a party, I was forced to sing in front of everyone. When I worry about failure, everyone gets up and stays with me. I realized that if I opened my mouth, cool things would happen that I could control. So I decided to swallow my unhealthy shyness, which was exacerbated by my deafness, and… I became a great conversationalist.
The strategy is simple: the more I speak, the less opportunity I give others to speak. This way, I reduce the chance of not being heard. This is perhaps the form of plasticity that best characterizes me: decisions that control communication around me and “strengthen” the areas of my brain responsible for speech.
Actually, I didn’t invent anything : We know that language ability (which involves brain regions such as the superior temporal gyrus) is not innate. Therefore, whether one is deaf or deaf, whether one perceives words with ears or eyes, it seems necessary Start practicing from a young age to develop your ability to chatter endlessly.
Admittedly, I may have also been putting too much stress on the areas of the brain responsible for bad humor. But that’s another story!
Thomas Marissal has received funding from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), Aix-Marseille University (AMU) and the Amidex Foundation, the National Research Agency (ANR) and the Federation for Brain Research (FRC).
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