9/21/2023 0 Comments Miracle ear listening earsThis involves the use of the brain’s inhibition mechanisms, which handle incoming distractions while maintaining focus on the target speech signal. Through binaural processing, the brain assigns the correct characteristics to these sources simultaneously. For this reason, it is sometimes called effortful listening. The third component to binaural processing, which is binaural directed attention, involves more than just the auditory pathways it requires intentional steering from the brain. These two binaural processes occur without our conscious intent. This is additive to the redundancy benefit that I discussed previously. This is not to be confused with the 1 to 2 dB improvement associated with binaural redundancy. The overall benefit is about a 1 to 2 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio. It only happens when the signal from both ears is present. It occurs because the brain stem is able to process timing, amplitude, and spectral differences between the two ears. This is referred to as binaural squelch - the noise being that which is squelched. With monaural hearing, we are forced to process the speech and noise together, but with binaural hearing, we can separate the speech from the noise. This is referred to as binaural redundancy, and it helps with localization, understanding in noise, spatial awareness, and focus. The advantage of binaural processing is that the brain is able to fuse those two inputs the central auditory perception often is superior to either independent signal. While the patient will now have two opportunities to hear the signal, those signals received by the brain from each ear are somewhat different. This advantage has been researched extensively, and it is often attributed to an enhancement in central auditory processing. One of the reasons this is true is because monaural hearing provides a very limited signal binaural hearing gives approximately a 1 to 2 dB advantage. I think we can all agree that listening and hearing with two ears is better than doing so with one. It shares acoustic information and mixes it, makes decisions about those inputs, and then sends those signals back to each hearing aid. This lets us create an authentic binaural listening situation that is able to give back some of the essential binaural processes that having a hearing loss takes away. That increase in processing power allows us to do what we could not do before, and that is to exchange acoustic information from one hearing aid to the other. ![]() You might be asking yourself, “So what? What does that even mean to me and my patients?” The most important thing and what I am going to cover is that we now have about 20% more processing power than we did with the TwinCore product. Just two years later, we have introduced QuadCore, which is able to process 300 million instructions per second. ![]() The space shuttle in the ‘90s could process almost 1.5 million instructions per second in 2013, our TwinCore platform was introduced, and it was and is able to handle about 250 million instructions per second. ![]() To give you a perspective about how hearing aids have advanced over the years, consider this. Let’s look at a short introductory video that will highlight our latest products and technology features.
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