Go to a bar or a party and watch the volumn of people’s voices raise and if at a party the stereo usually gets raised along with the voices throughout the night.
Now, if I sit at home and drink a few beers I notice no matter if outside circumstances remain the same that I usually end up increasing the volumn on my TV.
What is the issue here? Does alcohol deaden the nerves in your ears?
Is there a medical explanation for this and can this be a permanent problem?
I’m not sure if alcohol really does affect hearing or not? I can only report from personal experience, and I may have a suggestion to what might be a partial contributor to the effect you have noticed.
I was born severely-to-profoundly deaf. Even with powerful behind-the-ear hearing aids, I have a preference for lip-reading when trying to understand what another person is saying to me.
I discovered quite some time ago that even a mild buzz from consuming alcohol, not even really drunk, can severely impair my ability to lip-read. I simply cannot muster the concentration necessary for this task. And this happens if I have more than one beer in an hour. For this reason, when I’m drinking beer, I space them out over a long enough time so that my ability to understand another person talking isn’t affected. This means that I have never been drunk in my entire life.
Since so much of personal communication is non-verbal, I believe that everyone lip-reads to a certain extent, even if they are not aware of it. If not lip-reading, then the listener is definitely looking for a lot of non-verbal cues. I have observed more than once in the patients that I work with, that whenever they take off their glasses (to clean them or whatever), they have a much harder time understanding me when I talk. The reason is simple, without their glasses, they can’t lip-read.
The answer to why voices increase in intensity in a bar seems rather obvious. In the presence of background noise, a speaker tends to raise the intensity of their own voice to compensate.
The answer to why it may happen to you in quiet may simply be that alcohol affects your ability to concentrate enough to accurately perceive non-verbal cues, including lip-reading, thus leading to a more difficult time trying to understand what someone is saying, even if the volume of their voice is perfectly adequate.
People raising their voices while drinking probably has more to do with them loosineng up due to drinking. As far as the TV thing. I do that with my car radio. I go faster and raise the radio to accomodate the noise. A good song and I raise it some more, ect. I dont realize how loud it is until I get out, then get back in again.
Of course it gets harder to concentrate on things while drunk. My hearing doesn’t go so much as my brain picking up on what is said.
No offense but this method of reply drives me nuts. I already know what you are replying to…
As for the topic at hand, I do this only when drinking, aka the increasing of the volumn of my TV. In the morning I end up having to turn it down to a great degree.
< really, there was no offense meant by that but sheesh most people read the OP before getting to the answers to get to the meat of things >
Alcohol dulls your perception. Period. All five senses. Nerve conductivity. Reflexes. Why do you think they say: “Do not drink and drive”?
You can’t even hear your TV, man…