The challenge of unilateral hearing loss
Unilateral hearing loss, as befits its name, refers to hearing loss in only one ear. The main causes of unilateral hearing loss are physical injury, acoustic neroma (a benign intracranial tumor), microtia (where one ear is underdeveloped), or disease (measles, meningitis, mumps, etc.). While this may sound like a minimal impairment compared to full hearing loss, it presents its own set of challenges. These are mostly associated with the difficulty of interpreting sound through only one mediumin other words, hearing in mono instead of stereo. Cover one of your own ears in a crowd, or in a situation where someone is speaking over background noise. Can you pick out where the speaker is, or differentiate the speech from the environment? More