Personal Science Week - 240418
How does your hearing compare?
Professional scientists and medical doctors have one major advantage over a personal scientist: because they see so many more cases than we do, they can often intuitively understand the overall context of an observation. An expert has seen thousands of cases; you've maybe seen just this one.
That’s one reason we're interested in aggregate data that lets us see side-by-side how we compare with others.
This week we'll link to a few examples related to hearing.
How’s your hearing?
Flowingdata recently published an interactive graphic that lets you see just how many of your peers need a hearing aid. A tiny percentage of us need them before age 60, but among 80-year-olds it’s closer to 20%.
That’s interesting, but how can I tell exactly how my hearing compares, and how will I notice if it starts to fail?
At home hearing test
It’s now legal to buy hearing aids without an expensive visit to a credentialed professional and now all of us have access to apps like Soundly, a simple 5-minute hearing test you can do yourself. While wearing headphones in a quiet room, just adjust the sliders to the lowest setting that lets you hear the tones.
Once you’ve tested each ear, a simple chart shows your hearing levels at various frequencies and what that means for your hearing ability. The site then offers hearing aids, ranging in price from about $700 to $5000.
I know nothing about the company or its tests, so I won’t vouch for the test or its products, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see many more products like this. As always, please leave a comment if you know more.
How old is your hearing?
Another audio test lets you compare your hearing abilities against people of all ages. “How old is your hearing?” is a site hosted by a UK-based educational website that generates a tone that increases steadily in pitch. Click the button when the frequency is too high for you to hear anymore. Since people naturally lose the ability to hear higher tones as we get older, it uses your upper hearing limit to guess your age.
I found it uncannily accurate when I tested it on myself, some teenagers, and several elderly people.
Hearing through noise
But how well can you hear in noisy situations? Know Your Noise is an Australian government-run site that offers a 1-minute test where you try to listen to numbers obfuscated by increasing amounts of background noise.
I didn’t quite measure up to my age, though that might be due to my unfamiliarity with the Australian accent of the voice. 🤣🤣🤣
We wrote about hearing tests in PS Week Nov 2022
Links worth your time
Peter Attia publishes a high-quality monthly list of academic findings related to longevity.
This month a study (in monkeys) concluded:
Compared to walking speed (a standard motor competency test), they found that stair climbing was better associated with chronological age (R= -0.68 vs. -0.45 for walking speed) and declined further with age, suggesting that stair climbing speed may be more effective as a method for detecting subclinical frailty.
Globe Explorer looks like a Wikipedia-style answering machine, only with sorted images and a great classification system. Here’s how it answers “viruses that have already infected most people”:
Healthiest Cities in the US a survey that lets you compare your city against others. As you might expect, West Coast cities like Seattle or San Francisco do well on metrics related to exercise and healthy food options, but if you want access to good hospitals, Kansas and Vermont do pretty well.
About Personal Science
Are you curious about the world around you? Do you prefer to answer questions for yourself? Personal scientists think science is something that everyone should do, rather than leave it all to the professionals.
Check our main site, personalscience.com, for useful archives, including our new Personal Science Guide to AI, which we update regularly with updates we think will be useful to personal scientists interesting in AI.
If you have questions or comments, please let us know or leave a comment.