nohearing

Tomorrow, I will finish up a software engineering internship. I usually work at home, and lately I’ve been getting out of bed, wolfing down breakfast (berries, broccoli, and eggs), and conducting my morning coding session, all without putting on my hearing aids. Sometimes, I don’t touch them until the afternoon.

This raises the following question:

Is it better for someone like me to work without hearing aids?

Naturally, this would only apply during individual work sessions. If I’m working on a team project with a partner right by my side and we need constant communication, I’ll keep my hearing aids on. The one exception would be if that other person wants to speak using ASL, but that’s generally not a common occurrence.

I recall performing this “no hearing aid” tactic during my time working in the Williams College computer science lab. During peak hours, usually Sunday or Thursday evenings, the lab would get so packed that I couldn’t focus with all the screaming going on. (It sounds like screaming when 30 regular-volume conversations are happening in one small area.) If I wasn’t holding a TA session, then I would go to a corner of the back room of the lab, turn off my hearing aids, and work in peace.

The advantage of this is that I often reap the benefits of a short-term focus spike; it’s definitely nice to be able to mute all conversations under those circumstances. But should eschewing hearing aids be my default behavior when I work on something myself? Even if the only external noise is a fan?

Okay, I have to confess: part of the reason why I haven’t put on my hearing aids until so late during the past few days has partly been out of experimental interest. I want to see how effectively I work with and without hearing aids while having little to mild background noise. (It’s not a perfect experiment, because my surroundings are too quiet.) My impression is that I think turning off hearing aids can be useful under extremely noisy circumstances, but for most cases, I would not recommend it because there are too many downsides:

  • I’m more vulnerable to danger. If the roof of my house were about to collapse due to hail, but I couldn’t feel it (I know this example is crazy…) then you can imagine what would happen.
  • It creates some awkwardness if I need to turn on my hearing aids when someone wants to talk to me. My hearing aids — the Oticon Sensei — take roughly six seconds to start up from the moment I press the switch. So … I have to figure out how to stall for six seconds. And what if that person just wanted to say hi?
  • Related to that previous point, when I turn off my hearing aids, it’s not at all obvious to anyone else in the same room that I actually do have them off. My hearing aid’s on and off states are hard to distinguish unless a person has a clear side view of me. Perhaps if I physically took them out of my ears, but that creates a whole host of other complications. In this situation, if someone needs my attention, he or she is going to have to work a harder to reach me, and everyone else in the room will probably be watching us.
  • One thing I’ve also noticed in the past few days is that, when I turn off hearing aids, it blocks external noise but doesn’t silence my brain. It seems like if I don’t hear any natural sounds, sometimes my brain tries to “fill in” for me by repeating voices and sounds, which can be annoying. I think if I have my hearing aids on, some of the natural sounds can break that up (but not always).

Thus, while turning off hearing aids is useful when faced with prolonged noise exposure, it is not generally a long-term solution. With situations such as shared offices, which are a typical work environment for graduate students, I think the benefits decrease and the drawbacks (as stated earlier) become more striking. (At Berkeley, I’m pretty sure graduate students periodically interrupt each other to talk about research.) As a possible alternative, I could utilize noise-canceling headphones that cover my hearing aids (without causing any “ringing”) which would take care of some of the problems I mentioned. Interestingly enough, the last time I tried wearing noise-canceling headphones over my hearing aids, they didn’t cancel out any noise! So it seems to me that I just need to get used to working with background noise.