Do You Hear What I Hear? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Normal hearing

The frequency response of the human ear is not constant over the range of hearing - at the extreme edges of the audible spectrum, the threshold for hearing any sound of that frequency and the one for discomfort or even outright pain are the same. The loss of hearing ability at the very top end of the audible range (15 to kHz) is normal for this age. Age-induced hearing loss is only diagnosed if the loss of hearing ability is profound enough to negatively affect daily life.

Answer: Complete inability to perceive sound

In medical parlance, deafness is the complete inability to perceive any sound of any volume or frequency. Any partial loss of hearing ability is merely called "hearing loss". Importantly, acoustic hearing aids cannot help a deaf person, while they can improve quality of life even for people with profound hearing loss but some remaining sensitivity. For legal purposes, such as whether the person can obtain a driving license, hearing loss beyond a given threshold is of course equated with deafness. Most countries by the way do allow a deaf person to drive with appropriate assistive devices such as an electronic device displaying a visual warning when detecting an emergency siren or horn.

Answer: Tinnitus

Sudden noise spikes are the most common reason for tinnitus, the "ringing ear" condition. In most cases, tinnitus manifests as a single, constant frequency that can be extremely unnerving since there is really no quick way to make it go away. Thankfully, tinnitus caused by acute noise exposure is almost universally temporary and will usually cease within a few minutes to hours. Persistent or frequently recurring tinnitus is always a cause for concern as it can indicate a neural disorder, including various tumors. If you frequently or even constantly experience tinnitus, seek medical advice - not only can it help diagnose a severe condition but there are also multiple alternatives to treat tinnitus or at least make it more bearable.

Answer: Otitis externa

All of the mentioned conditions could cause one-sided hearing loss, but with these symptoms, you are most likely suffering from otitis externa, an inflammation of the outer ear. The swelling caused by the inflammation is what causes the hearing loss as it closes the auditory canal. This may have been caused by an infection or an object entering your ear. Seek a physician's attention and certainly do not attempt to find or dislodge any possible object yourself - you could cause damage to your eardrum! Depending on the cause and severity of the inflammation, you may be prescribed antibiotics and pain medication and the physician will remove any foreign objects that may have entered your ear.

(The symptoms you experienced might also be caused by a ruptured eardrum, but in this case, they would have begun immediately at the moment of injury, not the next morning.)

Answer: Complete recovery without treatment after several weeks

Flying with a severe cold always risks damage to the ear drum if the infection causes the Eustachian tube (which links the ear and throat and allows for pressure equalization) to swell shut. The pain and hearing loss associated with this injury certainly cause alarm, but thankfully, it usually heals without any special treatment. Contrary to common belief, this also does not cause complete deafness - even after complete loss of the eardrum and the small bones of the middle ear, a patient still has some residual hearing.

You should however need to take care that nothing can enter your middle ear during the healing time, so you will be advised to not go swimming and protect your ear from entering water during the healing time. Corrective surgery is not recommended or required for most cases of a punctured or ruptured eardrum.

Answer: False

There is a common misconception that the cocktail party effect is a symptom of hearing loss (particular of the age-related kind) that manifests as a particular difficulty to follow a single voice in a noisy setting. In reality, it is the exact opposite - it is the ability of the human auditory system and brain to isolate one specific stimulus (usually a voice) from a multitude of similar stimuli, even if the interesting part is actually significantly less loud than the background noise.

This ability is extremely difficult to reproduce artificially and this is the most important problem faced by computerized voice recognition: While good voice recognition algorithms perform well in quiet settings (and even better if trained on a specific speaker's voice), even a relatively low level of background noise can bring their error rate to unusably high levels.

Answer: Locating sources of sound

The auricle with all its folds is an extremely complex acoustic shape. It does direct sound waves into the ear, but the amplification effect is not that strong and some frequencies are actually diminished by interference between sound waves reflected within the structure. This latter effect is called the notch of pinna.

Without the auricle, you would certainly experience differences in how you perceive the frequencies of voices and music, but most importantly, you will lose the subtle timing clues caused by sound reflections that enable the brain to distinguish between sounds from the front, the rear, above and below. If you want to experience how different your hearing would be without the auricle, simply listen to some speech or music at low volume using high quality earplug-type headphones.

Answer: Hyperacusis

Hyperacusis, even in a mild form, can significantly impair quality of life, but in more severe forms, it can be debilitating, causing pain or panic attacks in everyday situations. In most cases, it is caused by localized inner ear damage, most frequently from exposure to sudden loud noises. Hyperacusis often occurs along with tinnitus, caused by the same distorted signal originating from the damaged cells. The most common and successful treatment for both conditions uses controlled sound exposure, usually to pink noise, to retrain the nerves and brain to the new inputs.

General unnatural fear of loud or painful sounds (not just selected ones) exists (albeit rarely) and is called sonophobia or phonophobia. Hyperacusis can lead to sonophobia.

Answer: Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a general term for the condition where perceptions made using one sense also trigger a different one. In many cases, this condition is not perceived as negative but provides the affected person with additional abilities such as perfect pitch. More pronounced synesthesia can however be distracting and difficult to live with especially when the effect is chromestesia - perception of color based on sound. A person with chromestesia may become disoriented in noisy environments when the visual effect of sounds becomes strong enough to drown out the actual visual perception.

Misophonia is similar to synesthesia: Specific sounds trigger (usually negative) emotions. Optoacoustic coupling is a physical effect and sonophotism is a made-up term.

Answer: Influenza

Hearing loss from infections is most frequently caused by damage to the auditory nerve. Meningitis has a high rate (up to 15%) of causing deafness or profound hearing loss in one or both ears. Hearing loss from uncomplicated mumps is rare, but mumps can cause meningitis leading to hearing loss. In measles, infection of the ear is a common complication and about 10% of cases result in some hearing loss, either from nerve damage, damage to the outer or middle ear or a combination of both.

Neural complications are rare in influenza.