I mean, is it creating changes upstairs there? I mean, what's kind of happening in our noggins when our ears stop working so well?

Yeah, it's a great question and one that we didn't understand for a long time.

there had been this association between hearing loss and cognitive decline and dementia, but we didn't really understand why.

So there are a few things that we can talk about, although this isn't fully understood still.

So one is that When you lose auditory input, when you lose sound, you're not just depriving your ears of sound, you're depriving your brain, specifically your auditory cortex, the area that's responsible for processing sounds into meanings.

You're depriving that area of the brain of input.

And when you deprive an area of the brain of input, it actually starts becoming kind of not exactly lazy, but your brain has a lot of stuff to do.

If you take some steps to address your hearing, can you kind of limit this sort of mental decline that might come with it?