Overcoming Deafness

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgement

The sense of hearing allows us to perceive sound, contributing to our awareness of the environment, and to make use of it as a means of communication. We will describe what sound actually is and then what hearing is, the mechanism we have which makes us aware of sound.

Sound is the result of the oscillation of particles such as air. The frequency at which they vibrate decides if the outcome is sound. We have to know how to measure sound to understand it. Its two familiar aspects, loudness and pitch, can be measured relatively easily.

We need to consider the structure and function of the hearing mechanism and how each part is tested. Small children pose problems with testing hearing but it is particularly important to know how well they can hear.

It is traditional to divide deafness into two types, Conductive and Perceptive, now usually called Neurosensory. Balance and tinnitus cannot be separated from deafness.

The obstacle to the transmission of sound lies in the outer or the middle ear.

Perceptive deafness results from impairment of the cochlea, or of the nerve of hearing, and also from malfunction in areas in the brain concerned with hearing. As the balance organ or labyrinth and its nerve are so closely related to the cochlea and the auditory nerve, disturbance of balance and hearing loss often occur together.

We can communicate using our visual, olfactory and tactile senses as well as hearing. Language, the basis of communication, involves sound when it is expressed as speech, but if sound is not used or not available we still have writing and gesture. Music is a form of communication that uses sound, and poetry too has its own particularity.

We can have language without speech as a deaf person may express it by gesture. To not have the capacity for language is quite different from lack of speech as it separates us from our fellow men.

Music is an extraordinary form of communication which uses sound and seems to bypass intellectual analysis, directly evoking emotions. It involves human attributes such as art and culture. Few things have been so widely studied but despite that, the exact mechanism, the way sound vibrations are transformed into feeling, is far from fully understood.

Everyone knows what poetry is and yet it is difficult to define. Wordsworth said that it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity though some contemporary poets insist that they can only write in anger and in these cases the language is certainly intensified, as though highly charged. Much is made of its sensory, especially visual, images but the sound of the poem remains at its core.

To communicate using speech we need not only to be able to hear but also to have heard speech during the early, formative period of our childhood. Our brains need to be able to process what we hear and we also need to be able to pronounce the words we wish to express.

There is a major difference between those who are deaf from birth or a very young age and those who became deaf after speech has been acquired.

The problems may be of speech, of language and of brain function.

The following sections are included:

• Postscript: Melodies Still Unheard
• Further Reading
• Index