TED Radio Hour - Body Electric: Your earbuds and you—what all that listening is doing to us

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Our special series, Body Electric, is back! This time, host Manoush Zomorodi does a deep dive into our headphone habits... because many of us wear them for hours at a time, and all that listening is taking a toll on our hearing.Manoush speaks with exposure scientist Rick Neitzel, who has partnered with Apple on a first-of-its-kind study to find how our daily listening patterns are affecting our hearing. Neitzel offers advice on safe listening habits that can help protect our ears in the long term.Later, Manoush takes us into the future of "consumer hearables" and how tech companies want us to never — ever— take our earbuds out.Interested in joining the Apple Hearing Study? Sign up here.Binge the whole Body Electric series here. Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge and our newsletter here.Talk to us on Instagram @ManoushZ, or record a voice memo and email it to us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Ted Radio Hour listener, it's Manusch. 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 1 are there. Plus, we've been doing new five-minute walk-and-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 Manoche. 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 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? Dozens of people passed me by.

You have to go to class. Okay, no worries. Avoiding eye contact and definitely not taking their earbuds out to stop and chat. I got totally blown off. We had her headphones on and looked really annoyed. So we put together a little listener focus group instead. I do kind of have an issue with always needing to be listening to something. I wear my noise cans.

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 Manus Shumeroody, and this is Season 2 of NPR's Body Electric, an investigation into the relationship between our technology and our body. 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 one 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. Okay. Can you still hear me? I can, yes. Hey, manu she. Hey, how you doing? Here, I'm...

Rick Nitzel 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 want to 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 all.

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 tenetist 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 who's hearing changed, what did their exposures to sound look like? Were they more exposed to sound in the general environment or more exposed to headphones 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 and 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. 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 riding on a really noisy subway, cutting down on that background sound, which lets you cut down on your listening volume. 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-tech hearing test you can give yourself. Anybody can do this. So if you know that you're going to do something really noise, 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 on to a podcast and turn it down to 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 and 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 attest, 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 like take breaks? Like some days don't listen at all or maybe after an hour. hour of listening, give yourself an hour off. Is there any prescribed sort of 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 fighter flight. response, which can be quite toxic if it's happening for extended periods of time. So, you know, 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, you know, especially young people who we know are reporting feeling more anxious and depressed even than ever, asking themselves, you know, 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, like, 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. You know, when I listen to music, I find it to be very calming.

Yeah. It can be, of course, extremely enjoyable. So, you know, occasional noise exposure is totally okay. listening to music is totally okay. 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 ear pods in my pocket more often, too. Listen to the birds when I can, maybe even stop and talk to my fellow dog walkers. Rick Nitzel 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 Langell. 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. Okay, we're back. So when I asked Rick Nitzel 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 Live Listen 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 earbuds 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 hearables. I saw a demo of another new hearable 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 I-O-1 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 and a noisy dinner party. Yeah, I know. Which is kind of cool. Unless those two people are trying to have a conversation about you. Okay.

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 Manusse 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 Montalione and edited by Sana's Meskampur. Original music comes from David Herman. Our audio engineer was James Willits. Special thanks to Colin Campbell, Fiona Gehrin, and Ariel Redding. I'm Manushe Zamorodi, and you've been listening to Body Electric from NPR.