Hearing fatigue in large conferences

In the real world, even with the best (and priciest) hearing aids, hearing and speech comprehension is a bitch. The vague and unpredictable discrepancies of room and object acoustics along with regular social habits makes it hard for hard of hearing and deaf to keep up. Particularly with Type A personalities who are common in the business.

Face to face conversations are not a problem. Groups of up to 6 people are easy. This issue gets sticky in a group setting of more than 6 or 8. For me to hear , it is crucial that I am able to see the speakers face. My comprehension suffers majorly when I cannot see the speakers face, and of course, this happens all the time in real life. Also, it is a problem with large meeting rooms which often have large reverberation times and other acoustical weirdnesses. (Acoustics experts take note!!!) Coffered ceilings and other fancy architectural details can make this especially problematic. And the Federal ADA mandates to supply hearing assistive devices has still not been enforced. There are plenty of hotels and conference centers that have no idea what I am asking for when I ask for help. (U.S. Congress, take note!)

I know I am not the only one experiencing this different result.

According to Dr. Ervin Hafter, a professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley (berkeley.edu), the extra processing your brain has to do when you have poor hearing can create an overload that can affect your overall cognitive performance. The extra effort required to comprehend speech in noise when your normal mechanisms for filtering out background sounds are impaired can put an overload on the brain that makes it harder to perform other mental tasks at the same time. The result can be poorer performance on work-related tasks and extra work keeping up with others than if your brain didn’t have to go through extra cycles trying to comprehend and communicate.

Excerpt from David Copithorne article The Fatigue Factor: How I Learned to Love Power Naps, Meditation, and Other Tricks to Cope With Hearing-Loss Exhaustion