Photo by Mark Paton on Unsplash

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If you have trouble keeping up with a conversation in a noisy restaurant, you’re not alone. After all, as we age, our ears and brains age, too.

Now researchers at the University of Maryland’s Hearing Lab are launching a study to teach older adults how to listen better. They’re seeking 100 volunteers between the ages of 65 and 85.

“For someone who has trouble understanding what’s going on at a dinner table at a restaurant and would like to be able to understand better, this might help them,” said Jonathan Simon, principal investigator. “It could also help us determine what helps other people.”

Simon’s team has designed a training program to help listeners understand more of what others are saying and to reduce the effort it takes to do that.

Six weeks, mostly at home

The six-week study includes five in-person visits to College Park, Maryland. Parking is free, and compensation will be provided.

But most of the study can be done at home on a computer. Each participant will listen to a 30-minute session and answer questions about what they’ve heard.

Even “for people who don’t feel that comfortable with computers, it works just fine,” Simon said. His staff will check in “at the beginning and the end [of each session] to make sure everything is working and that participants are comfortable.”

Once enrolled, participants will be placed at random into one of three groups. One group will watch instructional videos and answer questions about them. Another group will listen to a speaker while someone else talks over them at varying volumes. The third group will take a memory test, which “involves much more of the brain and brings in memory and listening,” Simon said.

For each participant, both before and after the training, Simon said, “We measure how difficult it is for them to understand speech in noisy conditions, and, critically, also their brain activity.”

To track brain activity, everyone will have a magnetoencephalography (MEG) scan, a non-invasive test that measures the magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical currents. Eligible participants will also have a 15-minute MRI during the study.

People tend to prefer a MEG scan to an MRI scan because they’re “quiet and not confining,” Simon pointed out.

“We want to see what good things have happened to their brains — how these improvements have made their brains better,” Simon said.

Taking part in the study could improve your hearing and pave the way for future scientific developments, he said.

“There’s potentially something in it for them and for the greater community.”

If you’re interested in participating in the Speech Perception and High Cognitive Demand study, call (301) 405-5629.