Years ago, my future husband and I braced for our parents’ ritual first meeting. Surely this would be awkward, an evening of forced chit-chat between two couples whose only commonality was, well, us?
They started talking with enthusiasm about their own lives and marriages, and by dessert, they were relaxed enough to kvetch about their frustrations—most of which centered on hearing. Or the lack thereof.
“She’ll yell from upstairs and then just—” my future father-in-law dropped his deep voice to a mumble, as though my mother-in-law deliberately muffled her words to annoy him.
“I had to buy Frank earphones for the TV, he was blasting it so loud,” my mother confided.
Ah, that’ll never be us, we thought…
A quarter-century later, about a third of our scintillating marital repartee consists of requests, sometimes polite, often exasperated, to please repeat whateverthehellyoujustsaid.
So when I read a list of entrepreneurial Arch grant winners and saw a train-your-ears app, I called its developer, Nancy Tye Murray, CEO of clEAR and a professor in otolaryngology at Washington University. She and colleague Brent Spehar, a research scientist who’s also a tech whiz, have created an auditory brain training app that teaches you to distinguish a blur of sound into something comprehensible.
The app’s useful for someone who’s about to get a hearing device—and perhaps even more useful for someone who’s refusing to get one. You can choose a trainer voice—male or female, Aussie or British or American—or, you can use the voice of a loved one. Like the spouse you’re driving crazy.
Next, clEAR provides a lesson plan, and an audiologist gives you a weekly progress report. “You’re not training willy-nilly,” Murray says. “We have pre- and post-testing, and we get an idea of your processing speed.” Speech comes at us at about 125 words per minute, she explains. With a hearing loss, you have to put so much effort into just recognizing the words, they slip away from you before you’ve processed their meaning. Because this training makes it easier to distinguish the words, “you have more cognitive resources to understand the content, and you don’t have to keep having it repeated.”
One tip: “Relax while you’re listening. Nobody’s judging you. When you’re nervous, you allocate your mental resources to ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not getting this, what is she going to say next and what do I say back?’”
Not only is the app nonjudgmental, but it’s fun: The training (in auditory attention, auditory processing speed, and auditory memory) comes in game form. There’s a serious reason for that frivolity, Murray says: “It potentiates neural plasticity.” That old notion that we get “set in our ways” as we age, calcifying until we are incapable of learning anything new? Fun and games loosen us up again, because the pleasure triggers a release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes the brain more pliable and receptive.
As for older folks grumbling about noisy restaurants and crowded, incomprehensible cocktail-party chitchat, Murray points out that as we age, we lose the ability to hear high tones. And those high frequencies are precisely what get masked by the noise of a chatter-filled room.
Now, Murray and Spehar are doing research with children (who require more complex video games!). “Imagine you have a hearing impaired child, 8 years old,” Murray says. “You can give him a tablet, and he can play computer games all summer, listening to his new teacher’s voice and watching her face.” When he starts school in the fall, he’s ahead of the game, comprehending a whole lot more of what she’s saying.
With the help of a Bear Cub grant from Wash. U., Murray and Spehar set up an LLC last spring, and in November, clEAR won an Arch grant. Wash. U.’s new Greenleaf Eliot Seed Fund chose clEAR as its first investment, buying equity in the startup, and the university also bestowed its first Quick Start license. “It gives us much more ownership of the intellectual property, as an incentive to do all the work,” Murray says with a grin. “I hope to do both Arch and Greenleaf proud—and be part of this move in St. Louis to attract startups.”
