If you have a hearing issue, it might be something wrong in your ear’s ability to conduct sound or your brain’s ability to process impulses or both depending on your exact symptoms.
Your ability to process sound is determined by a number of factors like general health, age, brain function, and genetics. You could be dealing with one of the following kinds of hearing loss if you have the aggravating experience of hearing people talk but not being able to comprehend what they are saying.
Conductive Hearing Loss
You could be experiencing conductive hearing loss if you have to continuously swallow and tug on your ears while saying with increasing annoyance “There’s something in my ear”. Problems with the outer and middle ear like fluid in the ear, a buildup of wax, ear infections, or damage to your eardrum all decrease the ear’s ability to conduct sound to the brain. Depending on the severity of problems going on in your ear, you might be able to understand some people, with louder voices, versus catching partial words from others talking in normal or lower tones.
Sensorineural Hearing Loss
In contrast to conductive hearing loss, which affects the middle and outer ear, Sensorineural hearing loss impacts the inner ear. Damage to the inner ear’s hair-like cells or the auditory nerve as well can stop sound signals to the brain. Voices may sound slurred or muddy to you, and sounds can come across as either too low or too high. If you can’t distinguish voices from background noise or have a hard time hearing women and children’s voices in particular, then you might be experiencing high-frequency hearing loss.