THE ear needs a noise workout to keep in shape. A global survey has found that city dwellers have better hearing than people who live in quiet villages.
Gerald Fleischer’s team at the University of Giessen, Germany, has spent over a decade testing the hearing of more than 10,000 people around the globe. As expected, people exposed to extremely loud noises at work, such as construction workers, had poor hearing. But the hearing of those living in quiet, rural areas was just as bad. “We didn’t expect that,” Fleischer says.
People like orchestral musicians and airline pilots, by contrast, have unusually good hearing despite exposure to noise at work, Fleischer told a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this week in New York. And there is also little difference between people who go clubbing and those who do not.
Advertisement
Hearing specialists have long believed that prolonged exposure to excessively loud noise degrades hearing. Industrial standards are therefore based on people’s average exposure to sound energy. But Fleischer thinks it is the very strong impulses – loud bangs, in other words – that do the most damage. What’s more, he thinks exposure to continual noise “trains” the ear to tolerate it. This would explain why east Asian villagers, whose quiet life is punctuated by occasional firecracker celebrations, tend to have the poorest hearing.
