‘He just has selective hearing. He can hear when he wants to, but when I speak to him, he can’t hear anything’ Mrs X says about her husband.

As an audiologist I hear something to this effect at least 10 times a week. A wife, sister, daughter or friend says the male in their life can hear pretty much everything except them. Selective hearing they call it. Usually, they’re saying it as a joke, but really there’s a nugget of frustration where they think it might just be true.

Now before I dive into this, I would like to make a disclaimer that selective hearing is real, but not in the way you think. Selective hearing is the ability to pick out a particular sound whilst ignoring others. For example, listening to your child whilst the air fryer is running, or listening to the radio over the noise of the car. We all do it to some degree.

What Mrs X is describing is NOT the type selective hearing I just mentioned. That is something else entirely and there is a reason why Mrs X’s husband is not able to hear her. Before even doing any kind hearing test, I’m willing to bet Mr X has high frequency hearing loss (a hearing loss in his high pitches). Broadly, when we think about hearing loss, we split it into low frequency/pitch hearing and high frequency/pitch hearing. Our low frequencies are responsible for how loudly we hear things. The vowel, or centre part of a word, is also usually a low pitch sound. Our high frequencies are responsible for bringing clarity to our hearing. Consonants and beginnings/endings of words are usually higher pitch sounds. Furthermore, women and children tend to have more high frequency aspects to their voices.

The typical process of age-related hearing loss is for our high-pitched hearing to deteriorate first. Hence, when people develop hearing loss as they get older, it is very rarely a case that they stop hearing entirely. It tends to be a case of losing clarity to their hearing as their hearing loss progresses in the high frequencies. It often happens so slowly that you don’t realise it’s happening at all. It might start with a bit more difficulty in noisy restaurants or struggling to catch the flow of a conversation with your friends. As consonants are typically beginning or endings of words, you might find that you mistakenly hear or interpret incorrectly what someone is saying. Or, in Mr X’s case, struggling to hear his wife because, as a woman, she has a higher pitched voice.

So, in summary, selective hearing where you don’t hear a particular person is not a true phenomenon. However, age related high frequency hearing loss is. This type of hearing loss is permeant as it comes about from wear and tear of the nerve endings in your ears. The first line of treatment for this would be hearing aids. If you’d like to book in a Hearing Consultation to explore this further, you can click the button on the top of the page.