Several years ago a man examined the ears of hundreds of children in Europe and found that about one quarter of them were a little deaf.

These children did not know it themselves; they thought they could hear as well as anybody. The teachers thought so too, only they were quite sure that those special children were the dull ones in the school. No doubt they were rather surprised when the man who examined them found that generally the dull ones were also the deaf ones.

The same man next went to a school in Scotland. There he asked the teachers to pick out seventy bright children and seventy dull children for him to examine. Strange to say, he found about twice as many deaf children among the seventy who were dull as among the seventy who were bright. Naturally enough, with such proof as that, he began to be pretty positive that dullness and deafness often go together.

From there he went to a school in England, where he became even more positive than ever; for here he found that most of the bright children could hear his watch tick when it was as far from their ears as fifty-one inches, while most of the dull children could not hear it unless it was as near to them as thirty-one inches.

All these experiments showed that when children are a little deaf they seem dull in the schoolroom, and that when they are not deaf they are more apt to seem bright. Nevertheless we know that very often deaf children are not really dull, for doctors have cured them, and after the cure they have been as bright as anybody. Of course the chance is that the better we hear the quicker we shall understand. It is important, therefore, to have good hearing.

If you wish to decide about your own hearing you might try this experiment.

Get several children together; ask someone to hold a watch for you to listen to, and see who can hear it tick the farthest off. Also test each of your ears separately. Cover one ear while you listen with the other, and decide which hears the better. You may find a difference between them.

If the other children can hear the watch farther away than you can hear it, or if one of your ears hears better than the other, you should tell your father and he should take you to a doctor to be examined. Very likely the doctor will find out what the trouble is and cure you.

The only means we have of knowing anything about the machinery that does all this hearing is what people tell us who have seen what there is on the other side of the eardrum.

First they find three tiny bones that stretch from the underside of the drum to the next part of the hearing machine, which is called the inside ear. Here there are slender tubes full of liquid, within bone channels full of liquid, and a special tube in a bony case that looks like a snail shell.

This inside ear is the most important part of the hearing machine, because the nerves which report the sound to the brain are here. It is so small that you could put it into a box one inch square, but it is more precious than any box of gold, and the bony case that holds it is stronger than any watch case. Every sound that we hear—whether it be a clap of thunder or the whisper of our dearest friend—goes through the eardrum, the tiny bones, the liquid, and the nerves, to the brain and that is what we call hearing.

Our ears may, however, get out of order. I know a boy who is deaf whenever he catches cold, and with each cold he is a little deafer than he was the time before. The worst of it is that the cold sometimes gives him an abscess in his ear. He had that sort of cold last winter, and I never saw any boy suffer such terrible pain. At last, however, the pain went away and he felt quite well again; yet he was deaf for weeks afterwards. He could not hear his own watch tick, while anyone who talked to him had to shout. I told him he must make up his mind never to take another cold, for at this rate he would be perfectly deaf after a while.

Even people who hear very well do not always hear the same things in the same way. If you should go into the woods when the birds are singing, you would probably hear a great confusion of sounds and songs; perhaps you would not know one song from another; whereas, in the same woods, a man who had trained his hearing for bird songs might say, "I hear the voices of a dozen different birds that I know." And then he would give you their names,—robin, bluebird, flicker, goldfinch, and all the others.

One of the most astonishing things about our hearing is that we can make it careful or careless by the way we use our ears. Listen carefully to a new song or a new piece of music and you will learn it faster. Separate the noises on the city street every day, and you will learn to know each sound by itself. The more carefully we listen, the better we remember; and the better we remember, the more we enjoy what we hear.

Thus one thing helps another: teach yourself to listen to sounds and you will surprise yourself and your friends by the way you remember them.

Albert S. Lyons

Copyrighted material; do not reprint without permission.

 

View all articles by Albert S. Lyons