People who struggle carrying on a conversation in a noisy room, even when they are really trying to listen, have their aging brains to blame.
Researchers at Western University have found older people have difficulty tuning out background noise in a loud room because their brains have a tougher time following speech rhythms and patterns during one-on-one conversations.
The difficulty in hearing in crowded rooms doesn't just apply to those with hearing loss either.
The study found the so-called “cocktail party effect” ordinarily lets younger people lock onto another person’s speech patterns and block out irrelevant noise in a sea of sound. However, seniors are less able to distinguish between sounds as neural oscillations don’t synchronize as well when dealing with sound rhythms that replicate speech rates.
“What we found was that younger and older adults have different strategies for ‘listening closely’ to sounds,” said study author Molly J. Henry from the Department of Psychology and the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University. “Ideally, understanding how the brain balances different listening strategies might lead us to design better hearing devices if we know which sound features to enhance."
The study has been published in the Nature Communications journal.
