Page 150 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

134 • Chapter 5

However, his problem is just the opposite of Shelly’s: it’s
with high-frequency sounds. His daughters deliberately try
to lower the pitch of their voices when they speak to him.
Certain medications, such as those that reduce high
blood pressure and inflammation, can decrease hearing ef-
4
fectiveness in the high-frequency range. You must have
your hearing checked. Just because you hear some sound
frequencies does not mean that you are hearing all sound
frequencies at a safe level.
This loss of hearing may have a great impact on social in-
teraction. Asking people to repeat their conversations may
cause older adults to become embarrassed, frustrated, and
avoid interactions with others. You can use many strategies
to accommodate this decline, however. An undesirable strat-
egy is to pretend that you know what the person said. The
consequences of this are not very appealing. Some people
with hearing loss try to “listen in context.” This means that if
they miss a word or two, they continue listening to deduce
what the speaker may have said. At times this is a useful
strategy, but the consequences might be dreadful if the de-
duction is incorrect!
For those who sustain gradual hearing loss, there is a
natural tendency to make accommodations. This anecdote is
an example of how one senior citizen made an accommoda-
tion for his hearing loss. When someone spoke to him and
he heard something, but not clearly and completely, he tried
to determine from the portion he did hear and the circum-
stances involved what must have been said. At first, he
found this to be a dangerous practice. He may nod “yes” in
the wrong places. Noting the reaction to your response be-
comes very important. Soon he became very adept at ob-
serving nonverbal reactions. It became automatic—like a
minicomputer was doing it. After a while, he agreed that he
needed a hearing aid. When he was being tested, an audiol-
ogist assumed he must be lip reading, because he was re-
sponding to questions so well without a hearing aid, despite