May 27, 2026 · 48 min · 11 segments
Most people picture hearing aids as chunky, uncomfortable beige devices of the 1970s. But the reality is that hearing technology has changed dramatically and continues to evolve at an extraordinary…
Leslie SmithHostNo entities detected.
Um, now your hearing focuses a lot on the relationship between hearing and cognition.
So for listeners who might not realize how deeply those two systems are interconnected, would you mind, um, just high level, just explaining a bit more what happens in the brain when your hearing starts to go down?
So flashback over 20 years ago, really around the year 2000, we in the hearing aid business thought we'd solved all the problems 'cause we were making sounds louder.
And then I, I did a lot of, again, understanding the needs, talking with audiologists, talking with people with hearing loss, and said, "So, you know, is loudness, is, was that your biggest complaint that, you know, things weren't loud enough?" And they said, "Well-My biggest complaint is I go to dinner with my spouse and, and after 30 minutes I'm exhausted and I check out.
Like, well, what does that have to do with loudness? That's got nothing to do with the volume of the device or the volume of, from your hearing loss.
So I started digging deeper, and w- people's experience with hearing loss isn't what we assumed as technologists or in the medical audiology field.
You're having a harder time with high frequency consonants, fricatives, and plosives aren't being encoded as well, and you need level-dependent and frequency-dependent gain.
They come in and say, "I want to be able to have a better time with my family-
And so that's what made me think that hearing isn't just about hearing the sounds, it's all the complexity of what you do with the sound.
When you communicate, you're, you're thinking, you're interpreting, you're understanding.
And it was becoming clear to me that, um, if the cognitive system was spending more time trying to understand the distorted signal that was being caused by hearing loss, they were focusing more on just understanding the words.
There were fewer brain resources available to then think, "Well, what does that mean? How am I gonna respond?" And even something as simple as remembering things can be affected by hearing loss because your brain is putting all its energy just into understanding.
Um, now your hearing focuses a lot on the relationship between hearing and cognition.
So for listeners who might not realize how deeply those two systems are interconnected, would you mind, um, just high level, just explaining a bit more what happens in the brain when your hearing starts to go down?
So flashback over 20 years ago, really around the year 2000, we in the hearing aid business thought we'd solved all the problems 'cause we were making sounds louder.
And then I, I did a lot of, again, understanding the needs, talking with audiologists, talking with people with hearing loss, and said, "So, you know, is loudness, is, was that your biggest complaint that, you know, things weren't loud enough?" And they said, "Well-My biggest complaint is I go to dinner with my spouse and, and after 30 minutes I'm exhausted and I check out.
Like, well, what does that have to do with loudness? That's got nothing to do with the volume of the device or the volume of, from your hearing loss.
So I started digging deeper, and w- people's experience with hearing loss isn't what we assumed as technologists or in the medical audiology field.
You're having a harder time with high frequency consonants, fricatives, and plosives aren't being encoded as well, and you need level-dependent and frequency-dependent gain.
They come in and say, "I want to be able to have a better time with my family-
And so that's what made me think that hearing isn't just about hearing the sounds, it's all the complexity of what you do with the sound.
When you communicate, you're, you're thinking, you're interpreting, you're understanding.
And it was becoming clear to me that, um, if the cognitive system was spending more time trying to understand the distorted signal that was being caused by hearing loss, they were focusing more on just understanding the words.
There were fewer brain resources available to then think, "Well, what does that mean? How am I gonna respond?" And even something as simple as remembering things can be affected by hearing loss because your brain is putting all its energy just into understanding.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.