Mistaking Fogginess for Deafness

When I was in my 20s, most of my friends were 80 and 90 year old semi-forgotten jazz luminaries. And I noticed a correlation: old people who stayed sharp didn't say "huh?' a lot. Old people who were slowing down, mentally, did. This made me suspect that hearing wasn't the problem.

If you simply slow down your speech, old people's hearing often works much better...even if you haven't raised you voice. The problem is often cognitive bandwidth rather than hearing. As your mind slows down, there are fewer available resources to process conversation in real time. The result is a buffer overload. Hence "huh?"

Much - perhaps most - old-age deafness should be attributed to deficient mental processing.

Of course, some old people really are deaf. But most of them are at least somewhat deaf, and that's the confounding factor. Their hearing being marginal, it's easy for them (as well as their doctors) to blame aural deficit. If someone with crappy hearing says "huh?" a lot, it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion, and there's no machine that can intercept brain signals and measure how much of the problem is in the hearing versus the processing.

So we buy into the myth that old people who say "huh?" are having problems hearing. Try slowing down, and see if it mysteriously improves. Or, even better, speak in canned clichés. When unsurprising things are said, that poses less of a challenge for sluggish brains (this is why we instinctively speak in predictable ways with babies and very young children).

More Observations On Aging
My Quora answer to "What does it feel like to be old?"


I have the opposite problem, myself. I have more than 50% hearing loss, but nobody ever believes I didn't hear them. So whenever I ask people to repeat themselves, they always, always rephrase with 1. simpler words and/or 2. greater politeness. I've considered pinning a button to my lapel with the words "Seriously Fucking Deaf".