Use and Optimize your Awesome Hearing Resource

The things we don’t think about!  This week the New York Times reported on Lee Duck-hee.  He is an 18 year old who is ranked 143rd in the world in tennis, a sport in which listening to the ball is crucial.  Lee is the best player in South Korea, and he is also deaf.  In tennis, seeing the ball is thought to be insufficient at the top level of play.  Hearing the ball enables the quickest responses.  Even milliseconds make a difference in a game with super-fast serves and powerful groundstrokes.

Each spin has a slightly different sound as it comes off the racket.  Martina Navratilova explains that “You first hear the ball. Then you respond to the speed and spin according to the sound.” Studies have shown that people react more quickly to auditory stimuli than visual ones. At this level of play, every fraction of a second is significant.  Andy Roddick noted that at Wimbledon his first reaction to the shot comes from hearing. He explains “I think you need to hear the ball pretty clearly to play at your highest level.”

Hearing is so important that some players struggle with crowd cacophony – at this year’s U.S. Open even the pounding rain caused some players to find it hard to hear the cues that informed them about their opponents’ strokes.

In his book “The Inner Game of Tennis” W. Timothy Gallwey preached attention to the sounds of the sport, and described a feedback loop created by close attention to the sounds of one’s strokes in order to replicate the “crack” of a successful shot. The body learns to repeat the movements that produce that wonderful sound.

So – how remarkable it is that Mr. Lee, a deaf player, could do so well without the benefit of critical auditory information!  Paige Stringer, founder of the Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss, suggested that people born deaf may have a stronger sense of intuition in general, and are more tuned in to the subtle clues in face and body language than people with normal hearing.

This led me to thinking:  We know that hearing loss is a risk factor for falls; we suspect contributions of the inner ear balance system, medications and other health issues, and perhaps decreased awareness of the environment.  I thought this article raised a related issue: that auditory cues are quicker than visual cues – for the tennis player this may mean quicker access to information about where the ball is coming from.  Likewise ordinary people deprived of acoustic feedback in the form of footsteps, maybe even echoes, may be at a disadvantage in keeping their balance.

I shared this with Dr. Frank Lin, a Johns Hopkins otologist with expertise in the field of hearing and cognition, and he offered this thought:

“Yes—I fully agree with you about the role of subtle environmental cues in helping maintain balance. Importantly, for many older adults, balance is dictated by lots of things—strength, vision, cardiovascular output, proprioception, etc. I don’t think hearing is one of the dominant risk factors but for an older adult who already has multiple ‘hits’ affecting their balance (e.g., diabetes and peripheral neuropathy, poor eyesight, etc.), hearing could be a key additional ‘hit’ that may in fact be modifiable/treatable unlike the other risk factors.”

My conclusion: use and optimize your awesome hearing resource! Whether for your best possible tennis game….or treasured everyday communication with your friends, coworkers, and family.