Now Hear This

If closed captions have become your best friend and it sounds like everyone around you is mumbling, we've got the latest feedback on why you're having hearing trouble-and what you can do about it.

- NAOMI BARR

MAYBE YOU'RE STARTING to notice that your ears don't work as well as they used to. At crowded parties, you often stand there nodding along because you can't understand the conversation. Or you frequently mistake one word for another-for instance, your coworker says "update" but you hear "milkshake." Your go-to response is "What?" If only real life came with subtitles! This (along with everything else) may be hard to hear, but these are common signs that you're experiencing hearing loss, says Frank Lin, MD, PhD, director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That said, Lin actually believes the term "hearing loss" is misleading. "It implies that one day you lose your hearing all of a sudden," he says. "For most of us, it's a trajectory that begins in our 20s or younger and changes, bit by bit, over our lifetimes." The CDC estimates that by the time we turn 45, roughly 1 in 7 of us will experience some difficulty hearing, and when we hit 71, about two-thirds of us will be dealing with it.

How Hearing Loss Happens

In our youth, most of us enjoy practically bionic hearing. We're born with a finite number of microscopic hair cells-around 16,000-carpeting each inner ear like a shag rug. These cells are high-tech sensors that convert sound waves into electrical impulses, which are then sent along the auditory nerve to our brain. Once there, those signals are deciphered into sounds. When we have our full complement of cells (or close to it), we can hear an array of pitches and volumes. But when enough cells get damaged or die off, we begin noticing incremental changes-like a tendency to misunderstand words-that leave us cracking jokes about needing an ear horn.