Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain (2017) Molly J Henry

[Subtropical Island]

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15801

As this describes some (a minor but very frustrating part) of my experience: difficulty with auditory multi-tasking, screening out background noise while doing things etc. I wondered if some of these processes might be relevant to ME/CFS. I am actually in the youth age range but my experience now is in line with the older group. Only since ME/CFS.

I was not sure which section to post this so mods please move where best.

I am not able to read this in full myself today but wanted to see what others (having good reading days or not cognitively affected) got from it. Sorry, i meant to put in an excerpt but can’t do it just now.

 

[Subtropical Island]

Quotes from the article cited (for those who prefer a preview):

Healthy aging is accompanied by listening difficulties, including decreased speech comprehension, that stem from an ill-understood combination of sensory and cognitive changes.

Speech comprehension decreases during healthy aging, especially when speech is fast1,2 or presented against background noise3,4,5. These age-related listening and comprehension difficulties are likely the consequence of an interaction between sensory and cognitive changes6,7.

For example, perceptually segregating talkers in a ‘cocktail-party’ situation (that is, attending to one talker against a noisy background that includes irrelevant speech8) requires top-down selective attention to the to-be-attended talker9,10. Recent work indicates that solving the cocktail-party problem also depends on synchronization of low-frequency neural oscillations (that is, entrainment) to the attended speech11,12,13.

Here, we use electroencephalography to demonstrate that auditory neural oscillations of older adults entrain less firmly and less flexibly to speech-paced (∼3 Hz) rhythms than younger adults’ during attentive listening.

Balancing these two neural strategies may present new paths for intervention in age-related listening difficulties.

 

[Mithriel]

I have been plagued by this since I was a teenager with ME and it is definitely part of the sensory overload we experience. However my daughter was tested for hearing difficulties and was told this was a form of deafness where the auditory nerve works but the brain can't make sense of things. She was given a leaflet and told to use the same coping methods as in other forms of hearing problems.

In a different health authority my son had also been referred to audiology unknown to us but he was just told he had nothing wrong with the auditory nerve and dismissed. He got the leaflet

The brain is so complicated and the sensory workings so involved that it is no wonder we have so much problems with ME.