Learn about hearing

Your Hearing is Important

Good hearing is an important part of your personal quality of life. Hearing well helps you to lead an active life, feel more comfortable and more self-assured even in a large group or a noisy place. And hearing well helps keep your brain stimulated.

Follow the sound on its journey from ears to brain

When we talk about our ears, we are usually referring to the part that’s visible from the outside. But that’s not even half the story.
In fact, that part is just the outer ear. A much larger part of our hearing systems is safe within the protection of our heads.

1. Sound reaches the Concha...
2. ...is guided to the auditory canal...
3. ...collides with the ear drum, makes it vibrate...
4. ..is then conveyed to the inner ear via the chain of tiny auditory ossicles (bones).
5. Hair cells convert the movement there into electrical impulses, which are transmitted to the brain via the auditory nerve.

Where does a sound come from? How loud is it? Is it a word? What does it mean? By the time we grow up, we are already listening from experience. We “block out” noises that we have learned are not important, such as continual background noises.

Our speech comprehension depends on the extent to which we learn a language. But emotional significance also plays a role. After all, auditory comprehension is not the job of the ear, but rather of the brain.

Relief in everyday life

Your brain can compensate for hearing loss to a certain extent,
however, compensating for hearing loss can be exhausting.
Fatigue is therefore often a side effect of hearing loss.
A hearing aid can improve acoustically demanding situations, making everyday life easier and thus increasing your personal well-being.

Preserving sounds

Hearing loss usually means that certain sound signals are no longer transmitted to the brain so the brain is missing information making it much more difficult to understand words. Often you can hear that someone is talking, but you can’t hear the words clearly. The early use of hearing aids can keep your brain active by giving it the information it needs to understand speech.