Recently Read: Restore Hearing Naturally - Anton Stucki

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, and I'm back with a book review.

I recently read this.

Restore Hearing Naturally - Anton Stucki

Subtitled: How to Use Your Inner Resources to Bring Back Full Hearing

It was a very interesting book. The basic premise is that you can restore hearing by retraining your brain how to listen. The argument being that hearing loss is often a consequence of the brain failing to process and locate sound correctly, rather than a consequence of damaged ears per se. The argument is also made that this hearing loss or imbalance is usually caused by emotional or physical trauma. An event, or series of events in life, that knocks the system out of kilter.

Overall, the book is a little New Agey in tone - so that may put some people off. However, it also contains lots of practical examples of exercises a person can carry out to improve their hearing.

Some of the more New Age stuff aside, the arguments make a lot of sense. We use our ears for balance, so being able to locate sound spatially is obviously a natural use and part of listening.

An example I would give is perhaps watching a video on a laptop or TV, when the speakers are located elsewhere in the room. Let's say the speakers are on a shelf a few meters to the left of the laptop screen. We watch the person speaking on the screen and our brain naturally pairs up the voice with the moving lips. So, essentially, we trick the brain into locating the sound in the incorrect position. In fact, if you consciously try to detach the sound from the image it can sometimes be difficult, so natural is it for us to associate the voice of the person with the image of the person. As would be the case in real life. So, in effect, the evidence of the eyes overrules the perception of the ears.

It's not hard to envision how repeatedly tricking the brain like this could, over time, perhaps weaken our audial spatial skills. So training the brain to locate sounds in three dimensional space seems a natural medicine.

Stucki, in the book, makes the claim that people with poor hearing struggle to hear other people in noisier environments, not so much because they can't hear the sound, but because they can't discern and locate the sound correctly. Hence why it's easier to hear a person when looking at the person's face, as opposed to when they're stood next to you or behind you.

Exercises

I've started doing a few of the exercises myself. Though usually I put my own spin on the examples in the book for convenience. Usually they involve closing the eyes and trying to locate a sound in the room with just the ears. Stucki argues in favour of using natural sounds - such as running water. Sometimes I'll use a running tap, but other times I might use something else, like a ticking clock on a wall. I'll close my eyes, spin around in circles to disorientate myself, then try to point to the location of the sound. (I should note that Stucki doesn't advise spinning around - that's my spin on things (ahem). Obviously, it's a little dangerous spinning around when you could trip and hurt yourself. So probably best to ignore me and stick to the examples in the book.)

When you try these exercises it's surprising how easy it is to mislocate sounds. Or just not locate them 100% correctly. Having just read the book it's too early to say if these exercises have improved my hearing yet. I do think this approach is very useful though, and would probably benefit a lot of people. It's such a novel way of looking at things, and it makes logical sense. Also, we live in such a false digital environment these days that it may be that this is adversely affecting our ability to process things spatially. Earphones, AirPods, speakers, dislocated voices coming at us from AI enabled gadgets and household appliances. Children raised watching flat artificial screens and not the natural landscape.

We often talk about the negatives of being raised online, but this aspect of it goes unnoticed.

In conclusion, I'm very glad I came across this book, as it's helped me to realise that listening is something we do in a real world landscape. And that it's essential not just for communicating with people, but also for our balance and spatial awareness. The ideas deserve a wider reach.