Alcohol may get the conversation going at
a party, but as the drinks flow you'll find it harder to tune in. Dr Karl
explains how alcohol affects your hearing.
You can't pinpoint it exactly, but there is an obvious change in the
party mood, when people's alcohol levels reach that point where they loosen
their inhibitions, and start relaxing and dancing. The obvious clue to the alcohol taking effect
is that the noise level goes up.
Why does the party get louder when people
drink more alcohol? What is the alcohol doing to the brain, and what are the
flow-on effects? Alcohol, known as
ethyl alcohol it has wondrous properties. It can remove oil stains
from the garage floor, store body parts and axolotls beautifully for centuries,
and in small quantities can improve your mood and self-confidence, and get the
conversation flowing. In bigger doses,
the effects are less wondrous. It can interfere with your fine muscle control
and your higher mental functioning, which messes with your decision making.
Alcohol Dampens Hearing
But getting back to party mode, usually
what you get is just that sudden increase in noise - thankfully!
We're
still not entirely sure as to what is going on, but it seems to involve a
feedback loop. Once you have a few drinks, your sense of hearing is impaired.
So when you speak, you mistakenly think that you are talking more softly than
usual. To compensate, you (without even thinking about it) automatically start
talking louder. Sound information is
carried from your eardrum to the central processing center inside your brain.
How does alcohol affect your hearing? The simple answer is that we don't know.
This hearing loss might be a direct toxic
effect, or anaesthetic effect, or osmotic effect - or something else. We don't
even know exactly what part of the hearing chain it affects. The alcohol might be acting on your ear
drum, or the muscles that can pull on the ear drum to quieten down the outside
world, or the cochlea, or the acoustic nerve that carries the information into
your brain, or it could be acting on that area that processes this information. Even so, regardless of the exact pathway by
which it happens, once you've had a few drinks, you hear yourself as if you are
talking too quietly. And to compensate, you start talking loudly.
Men vs Women
Interestingly, alcohol effects on hearing
are different for men and for women. In
typical studies, men and women (in a double blind situation) drank juice,
either with, or without, alcohol. Then, once the group drinking alcohol hit
around around 0.03 per cent, their hearing was tested at six different audio
frequencies running from low to high. On
average, the men would lose between two and nine decibels (dB) of hearing,
while women would lose more, between five and twelve dB. A lot of hearing was lost around the
500-1,000 Hz range - which are frequencies where a lot of speech happens.
But the hearing loss was different for
long-term drinkers. They tended to have permanent hearing loss, and more often,
at the higher frequencies. We're not
sure why. There are many causes of
hearing loss in our modern industrial world. Social drinking in the evening for
most people usually happens in a noisy bar. This adds to the noise-induced
hearing loss they may have picked up during the day.
We worry about getting blind drunk. But
maybe a greater concern for the inebriated, is getting deaf drunk ...
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