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September
7, 2006:
The Damaging Effects Of Noise
Interview
with Bart Kosko, author of Noise
|
Mike
Carruthers:
Car alarms, leaf blowers, people yelling into their cell phones
- it all adds up to an increasing volume of noise and it's getting
worse.
Bart Kosko:
It's getting worse, that in a sense, there are more digital
devices; that car stereo systems are more powerful. There's more
manufacturing and industrial processes and all these things together
- so overall average decibel levels are going up.
Bart Kosko, Professor
of Electrical Engineering at USC and author of the book Noise…
There's some
good effects - people do tend to wear headsets more and there
ironically, you're hurting yourself in many cases because though
you are cutting down on the third-party cost of the noise, you're
very likely increasing the probability of hearing loss. A study
from the Journal of American Medical Association showed just
a few years ago that there's something like 15% of teenagers
suffering hearing loss. And that's probably substantially higher
now given the increase of devices like Ipods and many other
systems that inject sound energy directly into the ear canal.
Bart says it's
important to understand how hearing loss occurs…
The inner ear
has a lot of little hairs - each one is a frequency detector
and if you laid them out, they look like a comb - and as you
increase the noise level (the background noise) it bends or
breaks the teeth in the comb, and once broken they can't come
back. By the time you realize that it's not only too late, you
tend to be increasing the sound level to hear more of it and
exacerbating the problem.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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