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One of the things that I am most often

asked and probably many deaf people are asked rather often is

Can you hear yourself speak?

I may have ruined this with the title

So I'm gonna start by

telling you that the word deaf isn't just one thing it isn't one type of person.

There are a variety of reasons that a person could go deaf and there

are four distinct types of deafness:

Number one conductive hearing loss

Number two sensorineural

Number three mixed hearing loss

and number four auditory neuropathy.

Conductive hearing loss occurs when

there is damage to the outer or middle ear.

This affects air conduction because did you know hearing is actually the sound

waves passing through air?

According to my not-a-neurologist-just-a-deaf-person knowledge

and thus the sound that should be flowing from

outside of your ear through the ear canal to your eardrum and from there via

the ossicles which like the tiny little bones in your ear to the middle

ear is stopped by a physical thing.

This could be ear wax or a perforated eardrum

but it could also be just a buildup of fluid in the middle ear from an illness or an allergy.

Yeah fun fact you can go deaf from having allergies!

Then sensorineural [struggles to pronounce]

Senso... [Struggles to pronounce still]

Sensorineu...[fails to pronounce correctly]

It relates just to the cochlea that's the funny thing that kind of looks like this and has

hairs on the inside.

This hairs can be damaged and I believe that this is the

most common form of hearing loss amongst older people

As the hairs degenerate as

we age and we also lose sensory cells

and there's mixed hearing loss which is mixed

It's literally a mix of the two

Finally auditory neuropathy which occurs

when there's a problem with the auditory nerve transmitting the signal from the

cochlea to the brain this can fluctuate from profound to mild deafness

And is often caused by a neurological condition

Many of these though could happen at any age from injury, illness

or just bad growth

I believe as you grow

I started to lose my hearing at the age of 15 and then by the

age of 18 I had to wear hearing aids

Although they are not just entirely sure

why I am deaf so...

But it's probably something to do with the two

disabilities that I inherited

One affects my nerves which are very useful

when you're trying to carry sound to the brain and one affects my connective

tissue of which holds together those hundreds of bones that we talked about

earlier, the ossicles

Could be either of those could be both that's just me there

isn't it whole decade later still a conundrum

and of course the deaf person

could be born deaf but there are a whole variety of reasons for that.

The auditory Ossicle

Which I hope I just said right please do let me know in the comments

down below if if that was wrong the auditory ossicle also known as the

ear bone might develop incorrectly while you're in the womb or it might be

damaged during birth and this would lead to conductive hearing loss

Or you might

have malformed little hairs inside your cochlea or a cochlear that is shaped

differently and thus that wouldn't transmit the sound very well.

So again that is sensorineural hearing loss and that is the most common type of

permanent hearing loss

If you're born with both conductive and sensorineural

hearing loss then you have mixed hearing loss

The sensorineural part of the

hearing loss would be permanent but the conductive part of the hearing loss may

be permanent or temporary.

That was my rendition of a juggling act

I mean no one's employing me at the circus

So these are actually physical

although since they're in your ear you can't really see them but deafness can

also have a neurological cause

Auditory neuropathy which stops the signals from

the cochlear getting up to the brain can be caused by a lack of oxygen at birth

or jaundice or a variety of other neurological conditions that you can be

born with or develop again this very clear type of hearing loss makes understanding

speech in a noisy area particularly difficult as it's very hard to

distinguish one voice from another.

Now, any one of these four types of hearing

loss can lead to profound deafness but they can also

do things like only make you be able to hear low notes

or be able to hear a whisper in a room with no other sound...

Variation!

Right, why am I telling you about all

these different types of deafness? Well for one it's important to spread the

message that deafness can vary in level and it can be for a variety of reasons

and it can affect people differently.

Now if one of your friends says oh that guy

can't be deaf he just jump to that car horn

You'll be able to say him

Ahem, I think you'll find...

I mean possibly not in a British professor voice

I just find it adds a little gravitas

I'm also divulging the range to you

because the reason of a person's deafness has bearing on whether or not

they can hear sounds coming from inside their own body and then what those

sounds can be interpreted once they're out there in the world and coming back

into the ears.

Obviously those with partial hearing loss can hear their voice to the

extent that their hearing loss is partial but as far as I'm aware any deaf

person can feel the vibrations and resonance of their own voice also

chewing there are four types of deafness this we have established but there are

two types of hearing:

Air conduction and bone conduction

So when it comes to

hearing your own voice there are the two ways that you could hear it air

Air conduction means a sound comes out of your mouth and then travels around into

your ear or into your hearing aid or into your cochlear implant

Bone conduction is when vibrations vibrations are imparted to the bone structure of your skull and

jaw and then transmitted to the cochlear that way which totally bypasses your

eardrum and any outer ear issues.

Like if you don't have ears. Some people are just born without ears.

So deaf person might be able to hear through one of these

means or neither or both but probably not particularly well

Please do bare in mind being able to hear with the help of aid does not make a person hearing

have you hooked your implant does not make a person hearing.

They are still deaf.

This aid is not equal to actual hearing and it's really not perfect.

The deaf person will still need to work harder to understand that other person

speaking there's still that lack of fluid communication. The hearing person

we'll probably be asked to speak slower and to repeat themselves and the deaf

person will still be missing words guessing at what's going on and smiling

and nodding

if smiling and nodding when you have no

idea what's going on was an Olympic sport the gold would be mine

Even if the deaf person now understands more than they did before

they're very deafness still remains

but can they hear themselves speak?

Possibly.

Can I hear myself speak?

not really

okay so I'm trying to explain for me sound is

less of a sound

[sarcastically] genius Jessica...

and it's more of a movement so some sounds I like this

this some sounds I like this

some sounds like this

Does that make any sense to anyone?

Okay, basically when I speak I feel this in my moth

Mouth, that was a particular one...

Mouth.

and I feel that and I feel it

going up into my head and then because that is such a big and overwhelming

feeling it overruns anything else that might be coming in so if I'm speaking I

would find it harder to hear a car going past me on the street or even the horn of a lorry

When it comes to my actual voice I don't really hear it through my ears

I can't hear my words through my ears but I can feel them and I know what

I was saying so my brain fills it in as if there was sound when I'm lip-reading

my brain just fills in the words all of the missing gaps totally filled as if

that was a sound that actually came into my brain

To me lip-reading and hearing

are pretty much the same thing because that's what my brain gives me but

obviously it isn't actually hearing so I misunderstand a lot of the words I

cannot get words that have not been in my brain before that [blows rasperries]

there's no sense to me there's no sense

but since I can't hear over speakers and

and my hearing aids are really bad at that

any kind of electronic device is not

it's not good I can't hear my recorded voice either so you guys tell me that I

have a very nice voice and I appreciate that thank you

I actually put a lot of hard work into this voice

I hope that's answered your questions and

you've learned a little bit about deafness today.

Let me know what your

voice sounds like to you in the comments down below and if you've enjoyed this

video please do drop a little like and if you're new here subscribe

It's always lovely to have you

I make two videos a week and they're generally a good time

because I don't like sad things like saying goodbye