Hearing and Listening Difference
Hearing detects sounds, while listening involves comprehension and interpretation. Listening goes beyond the surface-level perception of sounds and seeks to extract meaning, understand context, and discern the speaker’s intent. Hearing treatment is necessary in order to preserve and improve speech understanding, it fact it should be a mandatory part of what is called amplification or otherwise hearing instruments fitting. So, hearing aids alone are not always enough to preserve or improve the real function of the auditory system and cognitive brain abilities, required to ensure and preserve person’s independence - listening ability.
Hearing is the ability to use the ears only to notice presence of sound. Listening engages the brain using nerve signals from ears to interpret and understand meaning. So, ears are nothing more than just tools, but speech understanding and pleasure from listening to music comes from the brain having capacity to process send from ears nerves impulses.
Hearing
Listening
Sensory degradation / deprivation due to hearing loss can result in neural degradation and reduced cognitive function. Increased demands due to hearing loss can result in changes in neural resource allocation, reducing available resources for cognitive function.
Mechanisms of the Hearing–Cognition Relationship written by: Susan E. Fulton, Ph.D., CCC-A,1 Jennifer J. Lister, Ph.D., CCC-A,2 Aryn L. Harrison Bush, Ph.D.,2 Jerri D. Edwards, Ph.D.,2 and Ross Andel, Ph.D.2
Hearing loss caused by sensory degradation is known to result in neural degradation and reduced function of some parts of the human brain. Cognitive resource allocation occurs when a degraded sensory signal from the auditory system requires rearrangement of cognitive resources for processing. It makes the human brain pay more attention to the visual clues. For example, the brain focuses on the lip reading which leads the auditory system part of the brain to loose its ability to process sounds. rapidly deteriorating ability to understand speech and development of recruitment. This process can be recognized as annoyance caused by loudness of the sounds.
