Experts say we need to turn the volume down and protect our ears before it's too late. But few are listening.
If Nicole Russell could turn back the clock, she’d probably turn down the volume, too. In 2004, when she was seven years old, Russell picked up an Apple iPod, plugged in a pair of the standard white headphones, pressed play, cranked it up and formed a habit she’d enjoy for “at least five hours a day” for the next decade. She’d listen in the morning, on the way to school, during breaks, even as she fell asleep.
“I was told it had been accumulating over years, just getting worse,” Russell says. “I didn’t want it to be true, but it was a relief to know and be able to change things.” “If you have a particularly noisy commute and turn the music up to hear it, try listening to it at that volume in a quiet room. It’s painfully loud.”
It is believed that everybody – from obvious cases such as musicians and construction workers, to the rest of the public – is in danger of damaging their hearing from overexposure to loud noises, more than ever before.Many people are exacerbating the strain on their ears by constantly listening to music or watching videos on smartphones.“Another problem is that people are often quite reluctant to admit they have hearing loss, especially the young,” says Oliver.
Loud concerts are nothing new. But an appreciation of what could be lost by refusing to take care of ourselves when attending them is relatively recent. As are many other harmful factors. “Headphone culture” hasn’t been a part of everyday life for long enough for scientists to entirely agree on how best to make it safe, or for thorough regulations to be introduced. It is only recently that “noise pollution” has been considered alongside other environmental worries, too.
Swap ears with your partner and you won’t be able to hear properly. Do what Vincent van Gogh did – cut one off – and you definitely won’t. They are your ears, and you have two for a reason.Inside the ear are two muscles and three of the smallest bones in the body, encased within the hardest, the temporal bone, which is so dense it can make the inner ear almost impossible to biopsy.
But what if you keep cutting across the lawn on that same path over days, weeks, months and years? What if some people scuff the ground with boots? What if somebody drives over it? Eventually, the grass will wear down to such a damaged state that it cannot recover. This is what happens with hearing loss: hair cells have been destroyed permanently, creating a gap, so sound waves have no way of getting to the brain.
Sound, remember, is a force that can destroy more than ear-hair cells. When a bomb levels a house, it’s sound that’s tearing those bricks apart. One of the loudest noises ever recorded, the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 – estimated at 180dB at a distance of 160 kilometres – didn’t just burst eardrums within 65 kilometres, it was heard as two rifle shots in Alice Springs, Australia, 3600 kilometres away.
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