Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum and as I record this,
Speaker 1: we're in the throes of music festival season. These multi
Speaker 1: day concert art debauchery parties can be a blast, but
Speaker 1: research shows that they can also be a bummer for
Speaker 1: your ears. The sheer length of some music festivals, for example,
Speaker 1: each weekend of Coachella runs three days with ten plus
Speaker 1: hours of music every day, a plus the widespread use
Speaker 1: of alcohol and drugs can inflict serious damage on your hearing,
Speaker 1: with potentially permanent consequences. We spoke with Marshall Chasen, an
Speaker 1: audiologist from Toronto who specializes in hearing last prevention for musicians.
Speaker 1: He says that there's nothing inherently bad about going to
Speaker 1: the occasional loud concert or cranking your headphones up to
Speaker 1: Mack's volume to listen to your favorite song, as long
Speaker 1: as you do it in moderation. That's where three day
Speaker 1: music festivals become a problem. There's a point at which
Speaker 1: all sounds above eighty five deciples equivalent to the dial
Speaker 1: tone on a telephone, can inflict permanent hearing damage. Exposure
Speaker 1: to eighty five deciples of noise seems harmless enough, but
Speaker 1: if you listened to a dial tone forty hours a
Speaker 1: week for a full year, you'd suffer some level of
Speaker 1: permanent hearing loss. And if you turn up the volume
Speaker 1: to ninety four decibles, which is about halfway to full
Speaker 1: volume on an MP three player, all it would take
Speaker 1: is five hours a week to damage your hearing. Jason said,
Speaker 1: it's the total dose that matters, much like a radiation dose.
Speaker 1: A single X ray here and there won't hurt you,
Speaker 1: but thirty seven X rays in a short period could
Speaker 1: be problematic. Rock music at a live concert can easily
Speaker 1: reach a hundred and ten decibls. At that volume, your
Speaker 1: ears start to sustain permanent damage after only two minutes
Speaker 1: of daily exposure. It's especially important to give your ears
Speaker 1: a rest once they've suffered some short term hearing loss
Speaker 1: that buzzing, ringing, or numbness in your ears after attending
Speaker 1: a loud concert. There's a recovery period of sixteen to
Speaker 1: eighteen hours, during which your ears are particularly sensitive to
Speaker 1: further loud noises. Jason said, there's nothing wrong with going
Speaker 1: to a rock concert on Friday night, just don't mow
Speaker 1: the lawn on Saturday morning, and be careful about a
Speaker 1: tending yet another rock concert on Saturday. If you don't
Speaker 1: let your ears rest, there are several ways they can
Speaker 1: suffer lasting damage. The inner ears smaller than the tip
Speaker 1: of your pinky finger and contains the cochlea, a fluid filled,
Speaker 1: stale shaped chamber lined with thousands of hair cells. Prolonged
Speaker 1: exposure to very loud noises can disturb the fluid in
Speaker 1: the cochleas so violently that the hair cells bend or break,
Speaker 1: never to grow back. Another source of permanent hearing damage,
Speaker 1: says Chason, lies deeper in the brain, where nerve cells
Speaker 1: carry signals from the ear to neurons the process the sounds. Growing.
Speaker 1: Research shows that overloading those neural pathways with loud noises
Speaker 1: can disrupt the connection, creating situations where the neurons can't
Speaker 1: detect the signals coming from the ear. Luckily, the solutioned
Speaker 1: noise induced hearing loss from music festivals is simple. We're
Speaker 1: ear plugs. Lots of concert goers avoid wearing earplugs because
Speaker 1: they think it will muffle the music and ruin the experience,
Speaker 1: but that only applies to the cheap, foamy disposable kind, which,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I've had perfectly fine experiences with. However,
Speaker 1: there are excellent inobtrusive ear plugs on the mark to
Speaker 1: protect the air from dangerous sound levels without distorting the
Speaker 1: quality of the music. Professional musicians have been using them
Speaker 1: for decades. These are designed to evenly lower noise levels,
Speaker 1: some by as much as twenty decibels across the hearing spectrum,
Speaker 1: not just the high frequencies. You can find them for
Speaker 1: less than twenty dollars and they're reusable forever. Weirdly, drug
Speaker 1: and alcohol use at music festivals has also been shown
Speaker 1: to increase the risk of hearing loss. A study out
Speaker 1: of the Netherlands tracked fifty one participants with the main
Speaker 1: age of twenty seven years who attended an outdoor music
Speaker 1: festival in half were given ear plugs and half were not.
Speaker 1: All were advised to refrain from drugs or alcohol so
Speaker 1: that their hearing could be accurately tested after the four
Speaker 1: and a half hour show. As to be expected, not
Speaker 1: everyone abstained. The resulting data showed the concert goers who
Speaker 1: drank beer or used drugs like cannabis or m d
Speaker 1: m A experienced worse short term hearing. Loss, and interestingly,
Speaker 1: so did male subjects, whether on drugs or not. What's
Speaker 1: not clear from the data is whether the increased hearing
Speaker 1: loss linked to drugs, alcohol, and being male is biological
Speaker 1: or behavioral in origin. Chasen, for one, is convinced that
Speaker 1: drugs or male hormones chemically alter the inner ear to
Speaker 1: make it more susceptible to damage. Patterns of behavior are
Speaker 1: more likely at play, he said, using alcohol or drugs
Speaker 1: decreases your ability to self monitor, so you're more likely
Speaker 1: to put your head right next to a loud speaker.
Speaker 1: Your judgment is off, by the way. As far as
Speaker 1: professional musicians go, more than half of all classical musicians
Speaker 1: experience hearing loss, compared with only thirty percent of rock musicians.
Speaker 1: Jason says it's a dose thing, with classical musicians exposed
Speaker 1: more hours of loud ish music over their career than rockers.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler clayg. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio's How Stuff Works from Onenness and lots of other
Speaker 1: rock and topics. Visit our home planet, how Stuff Works
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