What is Auditory Training?

We offer this exciting service at Hearing Resources! Hear and understand.

Auditory Training?

It sounds a little odd: Auditory Training. What is it? How can it help you? Auditory Training is a service we offer at Hearing Resources Audiology Center. It maximizes the benefit of using hearing aids beyond simply amplifying sounds. It’s time to get your brain and your ears working together.

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Studies have shown that hearing loss is connected to increased social isolation and depression, as well as cognitive decline. Listening can be exhausting, and when your brain is working overtime to hear and understand what’s being said, that makes it difficult to pay attention to other things in your environment. In other words, when you’re using all your brain power to hear and understand, your brain can’t work on the other things it needs to. This is called “cognitive load.”

Auditory training, which is sometimes referred to as “aural rehabilitation,” was developed by hearing healthcare professionals to assist people with hearing loss by improving their listening skills and speech understanding. While you physically hear with your ears, your brain has to process those sounds and make sense of them. Your brain and your ears are a team. By using the auditory training program we offer, you strengthen your brain’s auditory processing capability. With guided practice, these programs are designed to help you increase listening accuracy and memory.

Auditory Training programs train the brain in three key areas:

• Auditory working memory: our ability to keep words in short-term memory so the meaning of the word and its linguistic context can be processed.
• Auditory processing speed: our ability to recognize speech quickly, which is important during everyday conversation, where one word follows another in rapid succession.
• Auditory attention: our ability to extract meaningful speech from a background of competing background noise, as might be required to do when trying to listen in a noisy restaurant.

A Personalized Treatment Plan

Once we identify your hearing loss, we prescribe a personal treatment plan for you, combining both amplification and auditory brain training. Think of it this way: if you have a hip problem, you receive a combination of therapies – a hip replacement and physical therapy. Both help you navigate your world with less effort and pain. With auditory brain training, you navigate your hearing world with less effort and increased confidence.