March 03 is World Hearing Day. Our ears and our hearing can do amazing things and because we find that area so fascinating, we have done a little research for you and provide you with a few interesting facts and stories about our ears.
Does this sound familiar? After an evening with friends – before the pandemic started – there is a lot of philosophizing at home about what was said on this or that topic. And sometimes we hear sentences like: “I didn’t notice that at all.”
One can ask the question whether there is a male and a female listening. Are in general male and female ears working different? Does a male mind categorize the spoken word more as “important” or “irrelevant”? Do men actually hear worse than women, as some people say?
From a biological point of view, hearing functions in a completely identical way across the genders. However, male hearing reduces between the ages of 30 and 50, in contrast to female hearing, which remains stable for a longer period of time. On average, a 55-year-old man hears as well as a 70-year-old woman. Female hormones seem to be the key to this difference. Based on a study by Aalen University, in a side-by-side comparison of two 70-year-olds, the man’s hearing loss is 20 dB higher than the female one.
The WHO has defined levels of hearing loss, which can be found, for example, on this page of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6796665/
But if that was really the reason that someone didn’t hear something in the conversation… that has to be discussed in each individual case. Anyway, it makes sense to have your hearing checked regularly by professionals.