A study conducted by neuroscientist Nina Kraus from Northwestern University found that the brain can be trained to overcome some age-related hearing loss. How exactly can this happen you may be wondering? Her study shows that people, whom have played music since childhood, had an advantage when distinguishing one consonant from another. Additionally she discovered that even as we age we have teh ability to improve our communication through training.
As we age our neural timing – the brain’s ability to decode and recode audio stimuli – becomes weaker, however the study indicates that these delays in neural timing are not inevitable.