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We’re born with about 16,000 little hair cells in our ears that act as sound detectors. When sound waves pass into our ears, the hair cells send a signal to the brain, and then our brain decodes the sound, whether it comes from a barking dog or a truck that’s passing by.

But “the brain’s interpretation is only as good as the signal it receives from the ear,” said Ellen Pfeffer Lafargue, an audiologist with the Center for Hearing and Communication in New York. “When the [hair cells in the] ear have been damaged, the sound that the brain gets is distorted or the ear can’t detect sound.”

Published on Vox

The reason you may have to say something twice when talking to older family members at Thanksgiving dinner may not be because of their hearing. Researchers have determined that something is going on in the brains of typical older adults that causes them to struggle to follow speech amidst background noise, even when their hearing would be considered normal on a clinical assessment.

University of Maryland, published in Science Daily,

Problems with the brain – not just the ears – cause a great deal of the age-related hearing loss in older people. Researchers are finding more and more subtle problems in the way our brain processes information as we age, so much so that an older person whose ears are in fine shape may have trouble hearing because of an aging brain.

In addition to earlier findings of a specific type of “timing” problem that limits our hearing as we age, the group is now finding increasing evidence of a “feedback” problem in the brain that diminishes our ability to hear.

University of Rochester Medical Center