Seventeen-year-old Nicholas Silva has one way to escape the tensions of teenage life: He picks up his beloved iPod. The Cambridge Rindge and Latin School junior places the earbuds snugly into his ear canals and sets the volume bar as high as possible. For him, there is no such thing as a mute button standing between him and the full-pitched vocals of his favorite rappers, Kanye West and Rick Ross.
“When it’s louder, you’re in the zone,” he said sitting with friends at the food court in the CambridgeSide Galleria last weekend.
But audiologists say that teenagers such as Silva may be heading into a new, dreaded zone: Irreparable hearing damage.
Since iPods were launched eight years ago, some 200 million of these MP3 players have been sold worldwide, giving young and old the convenience of storing thousands of songs on a feather-weight portable device with enduring battery life. The advance in technology means extended listening time; for teens, that listening is often done at an especially high decibel level, research shows. And that poses some tangible risks.
Researchers say the sensory cells in our inner ear — which transmit sounds to our brains — can only take so much auditory bombardment before they begin to wilt, irreparably, and die.
The damage teens suffer now may not show up until they’re in their 40s and asking friends in crowded restaurants, “Could you repeat that?”
Or it may appear sooner. Some young adults in their 20s — who listened at high levels hour after hour, day after day — are being diagnosed with hearing at the level of a typical 50-year-old, according to Brian Fligor, a former amateur rock guitarist who is now director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Teens often fail to realize just how much they crank up the volume to compensate for the clanging of the subway or the chatter in the cafe, research shows. Boys tend to turn up the iPod volume louder than girls, and peer pressure can influence volume levels, according to a recent study at Children’s Hospital Boston.
“I tell them you can listen loud — but you have to listen smart,” said Fligor, author of the study.
The obvious question for iPod fanatics is: How much is too much?
The science of hearing loss is murky, and like a lot of areas of public health, a person’s vulnerability is a combination of genetic predisposition and hard-to-measure environmental hazards. All people suffer some age-related loss that shows up anywhere from their 40s to 60s, but how much loud-noise exposure you can sustain depends on whether you are born with tough or tender ears. Some ears fully recover from an ear-ringing blaring rock concert; others are permanently weakened by it.
Because more men show up complaining about hearing loss, some doctors concluded that more men have susceptible ears; however some researchers believe that men’s ears over the decades are just more exposed to aggravating sounds, such as loud machinery in factories or gunfire in the military.
When it comes to setting safe guidelines for iPod users, today’s audiologists rely largely on a 1970s federal government study of more than 1,000 workers in various industries. They concluded that 8 percent of workers who were exposed to 85 decibels for more than eight hours a day, for 40 years, suffered serious, noise-related hearing impairment.
It may seem arbitrary to transfer that 85-decibel level to iPod use, but many audiologists have found it a useful guide.
Fligor, who has authored several studies about iPod use among teens and young adults, has some general guidelines for the typical user: Based on available data, he recommends iPod users of any age listen to no more than 90 minutes a day if the volume is set at 80 percent of its capacity — roughly a 90-decibel level.
If the volume bar were set at 60 percent, which reflects about 75 decibels, Fligor said, one could probably listen “all day” without risking serious damage; if it were set at 90 percent of maximum capacity, or nearly 100 decibels, a person could listen safely only for about 20 minutes a day.
Giving iPod advice is more art than science, and not all doctors are willing to set such specific listening guidelines. Sharon Kujawa, director of audiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, said she cannot yet give specific recommendations for iPod users — not until more research is done. She said “people are all different” and it is not possible now to establish safe guidelines, other than “err on the side of caution.”
Today’s iPods can be set to automatically limit maximum volume, which Fligor measures as about 105 decibels.
Roland Eavey, the former director of pediatric otolaryngology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and now chief of otolaryngology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, said today’s youth are far too oblivious to the dangers of premature hearing loss.
He found that only 8 percent of adolescents ranked hearing loss as a major health problem, while more than 40 percent saw sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse, depression, and smoking as serious issues, according to a 2005 report that examined attitudes of nearly 10,000 teenagers and young adults who responded to a Web-based survey posted on MTV.com.
That same survey found that 61 percent of them experienced ringing in their ears or some hearing impairment after a concert, and 43 percent after being at a club. Only 14 percent had used protective earplugs. Eavey emphasized that noise-related damage can be alleviated, in part, by giving one’s ear a rest between exposures.
Teenagers who think their ears are immune from damage need only know about the hearing levels of the Who’s guitarist, Peter Townshend, or rock guitarist Jeff Beck. These performers, now in their mid-60s, suffer from permanent noise-related hearing damage and they speak publicly about the need for more ear protections for musicians.
Fligor, who confesses that he too often loves to “listen loud,” tries not to be a purist. He said teenagers should remember that the occasional shriek-filled, booming rock concert is probably fine. Taking in a favorite hip-hop song at the iPod’s full volume also isn’t going to ruin their ears on a given day “as long as you don’t listen to more than one song.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and