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Hey, Ted Radio-Hour listener, it's Manouche.
So last fall, we did a special series called Body Electric,
which was all about how our tech habits are impacting
our physical health.
Today, we are continuing that series with an investigation
into what all our earbud and headphone listening
is doing to our hearing.
If you like this episode, go check out the Body Electric feed
for more.
All the episodes from season one are there.
Plus, we've been doing new five-minute walk-in talks
with people who are trying to get more movement
into their screen-filled lives.
I hope you'll join us.
Meanwhile, enjoy this episode.
Hey, it's Manouche.
And have you ever considered what we needed to listen for
thousands of years ago that rumble in the distance
is a storm coming?
How about those birds?
If you're run fast enough, maybe you can catch dinner.
Just in time for a nice chat with your family by the fire,
and maybe a little music on the drum.
But what about today?
How are you listening right now?
Did you just boost the volume on your earbuds
because of a wailing siren?
Or maybe you've got noise-canceling headphones on,
and you are completely tuned out to the world around you?
I recently tried talking to people
about their headphone habits in downtown Brooklyn.
Sorry, sorry.
Can I just ask you a few more questions?
Dozens of people passed me by.
You have to go to class.
OK, no worries.
Avoiding eye contact and definitely not taking their earbuds
out to stop and chat.
Do you question about wearing headphones?
I got totally blown off.
You had her headphones on and looked really annoyed.
So we put together a little listener-focused group instead.
I do kind of have an issue with always needing
to be listening to something.
I wear my noise-canceling headphones,
listening to music at least eight hours a day.
I have them up so loud, like louder than anything
around me in my surroundings.
I do kind of have an addiction, really,
to just listening to something being bombarded with noise.
Over half a billion pairs of headphones
were sold in 2023.
That's nearly double the number sold in 2013.
And over that decade, a lot of us
stopped ever leaving the house without our earbuds,
AirPods, Beats, pick your listening device.
Heck, a lot of us don't walk around inside the house
without them on.
What is all that listening doing to our ears?
I'm Enouche Zamorote and this is season two
of NPR's Body Electric.
An investigation into the relationship
between our technology and our bodies.
In season one, we delved into how all our screen time
is affecting our eyes, our posture, our ability to focus.
Today, let's talk about how our devices
are impacting our hearing.
And no, it does not escape me that you
might be listening to this very episode with headphones,
which should prompt you to listen even more closely
to some statistics.
The World Health Organization recently predicted
that over 1 billion young adults aged 12 to 35
are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss
due to unsafe listening practices.
I would add that a lot of us older people
are rushing towards early hearing loss, too.
Part of the problem is going to noisy restaurants, bars,
and concerts.
But also, one group of researchers estimate
that about one out of four of us
are exposed to what they call excessive noise
from personal listening devices.
All that noise can give us headaches, trouble sleeping,
stress.
But those big numbers that you're hearing, yes,
they're alarming, but there's not a lot of nuance in them.
When researchers say excessive, what exactly do they mean?
How loud is too loud?
How long is too long?
What about noise-canceling headphones?
Does it matter what we listen to,
or whether we listen on headphones or earbuds?
So it's only been fairly recently
that we've had the technological means
to actually start to really assess in an accurate fashion,
not only how long people are listening, but also how loud.
We have more than 180,000 participants in this study,
and that's a lot of people, as you might imagine.
In a minute, we delve into the details
with the guy doing a first of its kind study
into the impact of our headphone habits on our health.
And later, I'll explain what the future of headphones
looks like.
We'll be right back.
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I'm Rachel Martin.
After hosting Morning Edition for Years,
I know that the news can wear you down.
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Listen to offline with John Favreau every Sunday,
wherever you get your podcasts.
On this week's episode of Wild Card,
musician and producer Jack Antonov says growing older
can help soften our insecurities.
I love when you get to that point with some of the things
that bother you about yourself for you,
become almost like bored and angry about it.
I'm Rachel Martin.
Listen to NPR's new podcast Wild Card.
The game where cards control the conversation.
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We bring the wondrous world of animal science
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We find inspiration in the cute, gross, incredible,
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Okay, can you still hear me?
I can, yes, say my new sh.
Hey, how you doing?
Here I'm Rick Neitzel.
Is a professor of environmental health sciences
at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
And I've spent the majority of my career
studying noise exposures in the workplace
and to the public and how those exposures
might harm people's health.
And despite all those global health warnings
I shared with you earlier,
he says there's still a lot we don't know.
You know, one of the issues with headphone
or any kind of audio listening is historically
we haven't had a lot of good data
to even be able to answer a question like,
are we listening more or less or the same?
So starting in November 2019,
we launched the Apple Hearing Study,
which is a partnership between Apple
and the University of Michigan.
And this is really a first of its kind study
intended to better understand what are people exposed to
in terms of sound in their daily lives.
Over 180,000 people have volunteered to share data
from their Apple devices with the Michigan team.
And they really wanna know three things.
One is of course, how high are we setting the volume
on our headphones and earbuds?
Two, how long are we listening?
Are you rocking out for hours every day?
Or maybe you blast a political podcast in the morning
and then you listen to soft jazz in the evening?
And third, they're measuring the noise happening around us.
How loud is our environment?
Are we listening at higher volumes?
Because of that.
And then for the first time ever,
we're also actually able to deliver a hearing test,
even several different types of hearing tests
to those participants via their phone.
So we can start to link those exposures
to potentially changes in hearing health.
There's a speech and noise test.
Different speech with different levels of background sound
to allow us to assess how well they can hear
in the presence of background sound.
And a tentative check-in.
For people who are experiencing ringing, roaring,
buzzing, whistling that people perceive in their ears.
This allows them to take the test
and essentially match what they're hearing in their head
to what we play on the phone.
And if we see changes, we can start to evaluate well
among people whose hearing changed,
what did their exposures to sound look like?
Were they more exposed to sound in the general environment
or more exposed to headphone sound?
And so statistically, we can start to connect those changes
to differences in the environment.
With the goal of understanding, do people who,
for instance, listen to their headphones at very high volume
for long periods of time,
or do people who live in very dense city settings
who have very noisy surroundings,
are those folks more likely to have changes
or negative impacts on their hearing
compared to folks who don't have those behaviors?
I know that the study is ongoing,
but you are already figuring out a few things, right?
Absolutely.
So we've documented that about one in three
of our participants are exposed to noise levels
from their environment that are above
with the environmental protection agency
and the World Health Organization consider safe.
So that's alarming.
But I think the duration really is the key thing
that's just grown tremendously.
That is the top line.
We are listening to louder sounds
and we are listening for longer amounts of time.
And so, as he continues to do the research,
Rick has some best practices for us to put into use right now.
You ready?
Okay.
First, dig into your phone settings.
You can put a limit on your max listening volume,
like Rick does for his 15-year-old daughter.
I like to be able to set the volume to know
that no matter how loud she wants to listen to it,
it will only go up to a certain volume
that gives me comfort in terms of protecting her hearing health.
And I do the same thing on my own phone.
Obviously, we're mostly focused
on Apple devices in this conversation.
And here's something funny, strange.
Apple's volume limit is set to 75 decibels.
And the recommendation is for 70.
What the heck, Apple?
For the record though, I checked my iPhone
and my volume was set to 80 decibels,
which Apple says could lead to temporary hearing loss
if I listen for around five and a half hours a day.
Ugh.
Which brings us to Rick's next tip.
Don't just focus on how loud,
consider duration too.
It's not just how loud or how intense that exposure is,
but very much how long does it last
and how often does it happen.
And I do want to emphasize that your ear
can totally handle high levels of sound
if they are relatively short.
What we're trying to avoid here are high levels of sound
that you're having for prolonged periods of time,
hours at a time.
Finally, Rick says when it comes to choosing earbuds
or headphones, the design doesn't really matter.
What does matter is that noise-canceling feature
that most of them have these days.
Use it, especially in loud places.
So you're essentially providing yourself
a little bit of protection.
For instance, if you're writing on a really noisy subway,
cutting down on that background sound,
which lets you cut down on your listening volume.
So those are both wins for your ears.
A caveat though.
For those of you who have headphones or earbuds
that let you choose noise-canceling
or noise-transparency, when appropriate,
the transparency setting is totally fine.
It provides some protection for your ears
and it's safer if, let's say, you're walking in a busy area
and you'd like to hear the bus coming around the corner.
Yeah, it's a great point.
I routinely run with my earbuds in
and I use that transparent mode.
So there's some active noise cancellation,
but it's letting in, especially kind of sharp,
or acute sounds like someone shouting a warning to you.
And so you're already getting some protection
just from having that device in your ear.
If you've done all these things,
but you're still worried, Rick has a low-tack hearing test
you can give yourself.
Anybody can do this.
So if you know that you're gonna do something really noisy,
let's say go to a concert or go to a noisy work site
for your job, before you go and do that noisy thing,
if you put on your listening device
and turn onto a podcast and turn it down
so you can just barely hear the podcast.
Don't change any of the settings on your phone.
Go do that noisy thing, the concert, the club, whatever.
And if when you're done with that,
you put your listening devices back on
and you turn that podcast back on
and you can't hear the audio anymore,
you have suffered a temporary hearing loss.
I can virtually assure you that if you then,
for instance, go and sleep overnight,
not changing any more settings on the phone,
and take that same quick test in the morning,
you should be able to hear the audio again.
So this is your ears way of saying,
hey, that was too much sound.
I'm basically temporarily stunned and not working as well.
And given some time to recover,
I'll get back to my normal hearing levels.
I'm just thinking, Guns n' Roses front row, 1991.
Oh, fabulous.
Did not go well.
I couldn't hear for days.
Yes, and so that's exactly this phenomenon.
It's called a temporary threshold shift.
So hearing thresholds are what we're measuring
when we do a hearing test.
And if you have a temporary shift in those thresholds,
that means typically it takes you a bit more sound
to hear something that you would hear normally
because your ears have essentially been temporarily damaged.
But too many of these temporary threshold shifts,
and you could end up with a cumulative long-term problem.
Each one of those instances
can add up to a permanent irreversible hearing loss.
And as most people with noise-induced hearing loss
will test, you don't really notice that hearing loss
until it's so far gone that it's impacting
the quality of your life, your communication.
So it's a very insidious disease
that typically takes years or even decades to develop.
But once it's developed, we don't have a way to reverse it.
Hearing aids can help, but they don't fix or cure the problem,
which is why the prevention side that I'm so focused on
is so important and critical in this fight
against noise and hearing loss.
So is it good to take breaks?
Some days don't listen at all,
or maybe after an hour of listening,
give yourself an hour off.
Is there any prescribed cadence of listening
that you can give people?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA
and the World Health Organization, the WHO,
both agree that if we can keep everybody's exposure
on average below 70 decibels,
which is a little bit louder than you'd be talking to someone
or that I would be talking to you
if we were sitting at the same table three feet apart.
So if we can keep people's on average exposure below that level,
we essentially eliminate any risk of hearing loss from noise.
It's a truly safe level.
Now as people start to exceed that level,
they can do one of two things.
They could have a higher exposure,
but for a shorter amount of time,
or they could start to program in breaks
to give their ears some rest.
You know, I find when I spend any time
in a very high noise environment,
I just start to feel stressed and anxious.
And noise certainly is something
that activates our fight or flight response.
So in fact, noise exposure, chronic noise exposure
to relatively high levels is actually linked
to cardiovascular disease,
to heart attacks, to strokes, to high blood pressure.
And we think that's essentially
because it is activating that fight or flight response,
which can be quite toxic if it's happening
for extended periods of time.
So keeping an eye out or an eye inwards as it were
to just sort of take stock of how you're feeling,
that can be another way to sort of assess
if the noise is impacting you.
Yeah, it makes me think when people,
especially young people who we know
are reporting feeling more anxious and depressed,
even than ever, asking themselves,
what have my listening habits been?
That seems like an important one to add to the list
of not just screen time or social media time,
but just generally, I don't know
that we necessarily think about listening.
I would totally agree with you.
And what I don't want to do is dismiss
the benefits of listening to music.
When I listen to music, I find it to be very calming.
Yeah.
It can be, of course, extremely enjoyable.
So, occasional noise exposure is totally OK.
Listening to music is totally OK.
It's beneficial at the right level.
We just want to make sure these exposures stay down
at that safe level and don't creep up
into the level where they might cause harm over time.
I am going to try to do the basics of what Rick suggested.
My AirPods are set to 75 max decibels.
I am not going to turn them up when I walk past
the very loud construction in my neighborhood.
In fact, on certain blocks, I will make sure
I have noise-canceling mode turned on to protect my ears.
But also, I think I'm just going to put my AirPods
in my pocket more often too.
Listen to the birds when I can, maybe even stop and talk
to my fellow dog walkers.
Rick Nightsle is a professor of Environmental Health Sciences
at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
He and his team are still recruiting
participants for their Michigan Public Health Apple Hearing
Study.
We will put links in the show notes.
And when we come back, I'm going
to round up the future of headphones for you.
It is kind of insane what is on the horizon for our hearing.
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OK, we're back.
So when I asked Rick Nightsle why Apple was collaborating,
what's in it for them?
He told me he doesn't speak for the company, of course.
But his sense is that Apple recognizes
that these extremely powerful computers we carry around all day
can help us better understand our own behavior and our health.
And he hopes his work helps them design hardware and software
that minimizes the risks.
And to be clear, say what you will about the price point
or market tactics of the company.
But Apple's accessibility features
have long been praised by people who are hard of hearing.
There's a sound recognition setting that can alert you
when noises are detected like the doorbell or smoke alarm.
There's also a setting called LiveListen
that basically turns AirPods into a decent hearing aid.
Audio is sent from the microphone on your device
to your headphones.
So you can hear more clearly.
Rumor has it that Apple will officially
have a hearing aid mode in the next software update.
More people with access to assistive technology.
That is a good thing.
But let's be real.
All of these companies want us to use their products
all the time.
So to make it easier to talk and wear ear buds simultaneously,
the newest models from all the big companies
have something called a speech detection feature.
Whenever you start talking, it pauses what you're listening to.
This way, you never have to take your earbuds out, like ever.
And they may soon be collecting a lot more of our personal data.
In 2023, Apple filed a patent to put in sensors
like an EEG for detecting brain activity
into these AirPods of the future,
meaning they could collect and interpret your brainwaves.
Maybe they'll use that to coach you to meditate better.
Or track your emotions as you look at ads.
Who knows how AirPods will be used.
And actually, we should fix something.
Industry people have been referring to all of these technologies
as consumer heribles.
I saw a demo of another new herable that
will be on the market soon.
Do you remember the movie, Her?
Is that weird? Do you think I'm weird?
Well, you seem like a person, but you're just a voice in a computer.
Yeah, that's kind of what the IO1 is.
These supercharged earbuds are for chatting
with your personal AI bot all day long, no smartphone needed.
They also let you tune into the discussion
happening at the end of the table on a noisy dinner party.
Yeah, I know.
Which is kind of cool.
And less, those two people are trying
to have a conversation about you.
OK, have you been trying to get less screen time and move more?
Then I hope you have been listening and moving
with our recent five minute episodes.
I am walking and talking to folks about how they are
trying to balance work, technology, and their health.
I've talked to a listener in South Carolina
who is struggling.
I talked to the head researcher at Columbia
who discovered that five minute breaks are the gold standard.
I've also talked to a notable author, maybe you're a fan of hers.
I hope you'll listen along as you take a break from your screen.
If you are not taking breaks, we have a quick start guide to get you going.
And also, it's a weekly newsletter now
with more information and motivation to keep you going.
Just go to npr.org slash bodyelectric to sign up.
You can also find me on Instagram.
I'm going to be putting other information and tips
about these episodes on there.
Also, sharing my personal experience
with trying to live better with my technology.
Come say hi.
Tell me about your experience.
I'm at Manuch Z.
Meanwhile, thank you so much for listening to this episode
and giving us some time and hopefully not
too much volume in your ears.
This episode was produced by Katie Montellione and edited
by Sana's Meshkan Poor.
Original music comes from David Herman.
Our audio engineer was James Willitz, special thanks
to Colin Campbell, Fiona Gehrin, and Ariel Redding.
I'm Manuch Zomerodi, and you've been listening
to Body Electric from NPR.
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