Noise-cancelling headphones work by using microphones that listen to external sounds. Using clever electronics, these sounds are then 'cancelled' by playing an inverted wavelength to the listener, suppressing the audio signal to the eardrum.
It's like how a vehicle's active suspension dampens out vibrations from a bumpy road.
The result for the listener is beautifully clear audio with very little audible background noise.
The headphones can even help protect ears from excessive volume – less background noise means devices don’t have to play their sounds so loudly – so parents worldwide have been enthusiastically encouraging their children to wear them.
Sounds like a win-win. Until we started hearing about young people who were increasingly suffering from auditory processing disorder (APD).
These individuals often struggle to understand sounds and spoken words with distracting background noise.
The cause has potentially been linked to the massive increase in young people using noise-cancelling headphones, often combined with subtitles when watching videos.
Instead of their brains developing normally and learning to filter out the noisy world we live within, they never give their grey matter a chance to wire itself up appropriately, because they wear their noise-cancelling headphones constantly for hours wherever they go.
Our brains are like muscles: they develop in response to their environment.
Cycle a hundred miles a day and you’ll have superhero thighs, but skinny arms. Hear nothing but pure audio without any background noise and you’ll have a brain that can’t process multiple sounds at once.
Auditory therapy could help to retrain the brain, but the best solution is to listen to the world around us a little more before it becomes a problem. Shut out too much of it and we only harm ourselves.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Mary Watkins, via email) 'Can noise-cancelling headphones damage my ears?'
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