Seminar Experience

We had a research seminar at work today. I always hope that the presenter knows how to prepare good slides, as even with my hearing aid, I'd be lucky to pick up their voice, let alone make out the words that were being said.

During a seminar a couple of weeks after activation, I was able to pick out a couple of words here and there ("response element" are the ones I remember from that one). Last month, I was able to pick out a phrase here and there, but those phrases seemed to be things I sort of expected to hear, based on the slide showing.

Today's seminar was a leap beyond that: I was picking up around 60% of what was being said, in chunks of sentences (I think I twittered ~70% earlier. I probably overestimated it in my earlier giddiness after the seminar). To make this even more astonishing to me, the speaker spent most of the time facing perpendicular to me, so I was seeing his face in profile. That meant NO SPEECH READING! I was hearing what I was hearing.

I was picking up 2, 3 or 4 sentences at a time, but then I'd lose it for awhile, only to start getting words again. I was sometimes finding myself thinking back in a "is this what I just heard?" way, causing me to lose track of what was currently being said. Other times, things just didn't really sound like words.

Both my audiologist and the speech pathologist that I've been working with for auditory rehabilitation told me the same thing at my last appointments: I'm probably actually "getting" much more than I realize, but my brain isn't fully trusting the signal that it's receiving. That seems to fit most of today's experience, but part of the time, frankly, I'm just not used to "listening"in those types of situations for very long.