Hello lovely people I'm Jessica I'm a deaf Youtuber and I make very fun videos
twice a week. Subscribe to learn more!
One of the things that I am most often
asked and probably many deaf people are asked rather often is
Can you hear yourself speak?
I may have ruined this with the title
So I'm gonna start by
telling you that the word deaf isn't just one thing it isn't one type of person.
There are a variety of reasons that a person could go deaf and there
are four distinct types of deafness:
Number one conductive hearing loss
Number two sensorineural
Number three mixed hearing loss
and number four auditory neuropathy.
Conductive hearing loss occurs when
there is damage to the outer or middle ear.
This affects air conduction because did you know hearing is actually the sound
waves passing through air?
According to my not-a-neurologist-just-a-deaf-person knowledge
and thus the sound that should be flowing from
outside of your ear through the ear canal to your eardrum and from there via
the ossicles which like the tiny little bones in your ear to the middle
ear is stopped by a physical thing.
This could be ear wax or a perforated eardrum
but it could also be just a buildup of fluid in the middle ear from an illness or an allergy.
Yeah fun fact you can go deaf from having allergies!
Then sensorineural [struggles to pronounce]
Senso... [Struggles to pronounce still]
Sensorineu...[fails to pronounce correctly]
It relates just to the cochlea that's the funny thing that kind of looks like this and has
hairs on the inside.
This hairs can be damaged and I believe that this is the
most common form of hearing loss amongst older people
As the hairs degenerate as
we age and we also lose sensory cells
and there's mixed hearing loss which is mixed
It's literally a mix of the two
Finally auditory neuropathy which occurs
when there's a problem with the auditory nerve transmitting the signal from the
cochlea to the brain this can fluctuate from profound to mild deafness
And is often caused by a neurological condition
Many of these though could happen at any age from injury, illness
or just bad growth
I believe as you grow
I started to lose my hearing at the age of 15 and then by the
age of 18 I had to wear hearing aids
Although they are not just entirely sure
why I am deaf so...
But it's probably something to do with the two
disabilities that I inherited
One affects my nerves which are very useful
when you're trying to carry sound to the brain and one affects my connective
tissue of which holds together those hundreds of bones that we talked about
earlier, the ossicles
Could be either of those could be both that's just me there
isn't it whole decade later still a conundrum
and of course the deaf person
could be born deaf but there are a whole variety of reasons for that.
The auditory Ossicle
Which I hope I just said right please do let me know in the comments
down below if if that was wrong the auditory ossicle also known as the
ear bone might develop incorrectly while you're in the womb or it might be
damaged during birth and this would lead to conductive hearing loss
Or you might
have malformed little hairs inside your cochlea or a cochlear that is shaped
differently and thus that wouldn't transmit the sound very well.
So again that is sensorineural hearing loss and that is the most common type of
permanent hearing loss
If you're born with both conductive and sensorineural
hearing loss then you have mixed hearing loss
The sensorineural part of the
hearing loss would be permanent but the conductive part of the hearing loss may
be permanent or temporary.
That was my rendition of a juggling act
I mean no one's employing me at the circus
So these are actually physical
although since they're in your ear you can't really see them but deafness can
also have a neurological cause
Auditory neuropathy which stops the signals from
the cochlear getting up to the brain can be caused by a lack of oxygen at birth
or jaundice or a variety of other neurological conditions that you can be
born with or develop again this very clear type of hearing loss makes understanding
speech in a noisy area particularly difficult as it's very hard to
distinguish one voice from another.
Now, any one of these four types of hearing
loss can lead to profound deafness but they can also
do things like only make you be able to hear low notes
or be able to hear a whisper in a room with no other sound...
Variation!
Right, why am I telling you about all
these different types of deafness? Well for one it's important to spread the
message that deafness can vary in level and it can be for a variety of reasons
and it can affect people differently.
Now if one of your friends says oh that guy
can't be deaf he just jump to that car horn
You'll be able to say him
Ahem, I think you'll find...
I mean possibly not in a British professor voice
I just find it adds a little gravitas
I'm also divulging the range to you
because the reason of a person's deafness has bearing on whether or not
they can hear sounds coming from inside their own body and then what those
sounds can be interpreted once they're out there in the world and coming back
into the ears.
Obviously those with partial hearing loss can hear their voice to the
extent that their hearing loss is partial but as far as I'm aware any deaf
person can feel the vibrations and resonance of their own voice also
chewing there are four types of deafness this we have established but there are
two types of hearing:
Air conduction and bone conduction
So when it comes to
hearing your own voice there are the two ways that you could hear it air
Air conduction means a sound comes out of your mouth and then travels around into
your ear or into your hearing aid or into your cochlear implant
Bone conduction is when vibrations vibrations are imparted to the bone structure of your skull and
jaw and then transmitted to the cochlear that way which totally bypasses your
eardrum and any outer ear issues.
Like if you don't have ears. Some people are just born without ears.
So deaf person might be able to hear through one of these
means or neither or both but probably not particularly well
Please do bare in mind being able to hear with the help of aid does not make a person hearing
have you hooked your implant does not make a person hearing.
They are still deaf.
This aid is not equal to actual hearing and it's really not perfect.
The deaf person will still need to work harder to understand that other person
speaking there's still that lack of fluid communication. The hearing person
we'll probably be asked to speak slower and to repeat themselves and the deaf
person will still be missing words guessing at what's going on and smiling
and nodding
if smiling and nodding when you have no
idea what's going on was an Olympic sport the gold would be mine
Even if the deaf person now understands more than they did before
they're very deafness still remains
but can they hear themselves speak?
Possibly.
Can I hear myself speak?
not really
okay so I'm trying to explain for me sound is
less of a sound
[sarcastically] genius Jessica...
and it's more of a movement so some sounds I like this
this some sounds I like this
some sounds like this
Does that make any sense to anyone?
Okay, basically when I speak I feel this in my moth
Mouth, that was a particular one...
Mouth.
and I feel that and I feel it
going up into my head and then because that is such a big and overwhelming
feeling it overruns anything else that might be coming in so if I'm speaking I
would find it harder to hear a car going past me on the street or even the horn of a lorry
When it comes to my actual voice I don't really hear it through my ears
I can't hear my words through my ears but I can feel them and I know what
I was saying so my brain fills it in as if there was sound when I'm lip-reading
my brain just fills in the words all of the missing gaps totally filled as if
that was a sound that actually came into my brain
To me lip-reading and hearing
are pretty much the same thing because that's what my brain gives me but
obviously it isn't actually hearing so I misunderstand a lot of the words I
cannot get words that have not been in my brain before that [blows rasperries]
there's no sense to me there's no sense
but since I can't hear over speakers and
and my hearing aids are really bad at that
any kind of electronic device is not
it's not good I can't hear my recorded voice either so you guys tell me that I
have a very nice voice and I appreciate that thank you
I actually put a lot of hard work into this voice
I hope that's answered your questions and
you've learned a little bit about deafness today.
Let me know what your
voice sounds like to you in the comments down below and if you've enjoyed this
video please do drop a little like and if you're new here subscribe
It's always lovely to have you
I make two videos a week and they're generally a good time
because I don't like sad things like saying goodbye