Are headphones destroying our hearing?

[Music] I wear headphones all the time recently I've been wondering if all that listening is bad for me and this led to a full-on spiral where I learned the horrifying statistic that over a billion young adults are at risk of permanent avoidable hearing loss am I one of those billion in a time where we're giving our ears less of a break than ever before how can we make sure that we're not losing our hearing long term and what tools are out disposal to ensure that we can minimize that damage power [Music] on headphones are not necessarily bad like you know if you if you wear headphones you're not automatically going to develop hearing loss that's Amy Saro I'm a doctor of Audiology so I often go by Dr Amy Dr Amy explained to me just how fragile our hearing is it all has to do with these tiny hair cells in our ears so when your hair cells are healthy they stand up kind of like a field of wheat and when the sound comes through it looks like a tornado has come through and they're all twisted up if you're lucky they're able to sort of re build themselves back straight up nice and Tall but if you do that often enough or if the sound is loud enough the damage is permanent permanence in the sense that those hairs are bent out of shape forever and your hearing doesn't come back not naturally nor do we have treatments that can reverse the effects of it this permanent damage is caused by both duration and loudness which is me measured in DB and it works on a logarithmic scale which means if you're listening to something at 85 DB and then you raise the volume to 88 DB you've actually doubled the loudness even though it's such a small shift and this is where things can quickly get dangerous because we're often listening louder than we realize a lot of times it was 110 DB or it was over 100 DB and it's easy to do because you turn the volume up when you like a song and you don't realize how loud that is especially if you're trying to over power the sound of a train or the buzz of a coffee shop or your neighbors mowing their lawn so for context the US Department of Labor recommends no more than 8 hours of 85 DB exposure to be considered a safe working environment if you dig into your settings on your phone you can limit your volume to certain decel threshold but if doing so prevents you from hearing clearly well maybe you can lower the volume of the world around you power on the sound you're hearing is coming from this device which is meant to record what you'd actually hear if you were in this space and if you were using these headphones power now if I'm honest I always thought that noise cancellation was kind of a marketing tactic you know like a neat feature that was pretty cool but not 100% necessary the more I talk to experts the more I realize that it's actually a protective line of defense in noisy environments there are two types of noise cancellation passive noise noise cancellation which is when something is physically blocking the sound from coming in and active noise cancellation power on this is when the headphones have mics that can listen to the sound of the environment for Simplicity sake let's visualize this as a singular wave the headphones hear that wave analyze it and then generate a sound wave that's the exact inverse of it in anti-wave if you will when you put the two together you get silence or close to anyways our environment is much more complicated than one wave there's tons of different Dynamic sounds happening all at the same time noise cancelling headphones are best at removing persistent low frequency hums anything in the 1,000 HZ range or below think airplane turbines trains engine noise but that doesn't mean no sound gets in what's not going to work well with that are higher frequency sound so these would be like birds chirping or a sudden loud sound it doesn't have a chance to analyze and you know decide what to do with that so usually the sound is just going to come through and when the world still seems too loud but like emotionally speaking sometimes I find it helpful to pause take a second and maybe even find somebody to talk to and that's where the sponsor of this video comes in better help sponsors like better he make videos like this possible if you're thinking of s starting therapy think about giving better help a try it's entirely online designed to be convenient flexible and suited to your schedule so take a moment visit betterhelp.com svox video to get 10% off your first month that's betterhelp.com slox video now time to get back to the video Power on creating silence in an otherwise noisy environment feels like magic but it also leads to some weird questions like does noise cancellation have volume in other words if we're pumping an anti- sound wave to create silence are our brains interpreting into silence while our ear hair cells are still getting wrecked in a quiet tornado if it's working properly it will not produce a sound my name is Luke Keller and I'm a professor of physics and astronomy at Etha College you can think about it farther up this stream at the eardrum is bouncing back and forth in response to sound waves but if they're canceled it's not moving there's no vibration to transmit to the to the inner ear so it it it is literally making the sound go away there's no negative effect the cancellation happens completely in the electronics not in your head so noise cancelling actually does remove the sound leaving our ear hair cells largely unaffected and that's true of just about any pair of headphones that have noise cancelling so don't feel obligated to get the most expensive best ones any halfway decent pair will work well enough to protect your ears but it is important to note that noise cancelling headphones don't work on everything like if you go to a concert or need to operate a jackhammer there are way better ways to protect your ears but the important thing is that we should be making a conscious effort to protect them we think about putting on sunscreen and we can see when we have a sunburn but noise damage is invisible so we it's up to us to be thinking about it to be mindful of it and uh to save our ears [Music]

Channel: Vox

Views: 691,602

Keywords: ANC, Vox.com, active noise cancellation, biology, decibel, earbuds, explain, explainer, headphone, headphones, hearing, hearing loss, hearing loss prevention, loudness, noise, noise cancellation, noise cancelling, passive noise cancellation, safety, science, sound, vox

Id: TXk8CoMdxD8

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2024