Hearing Loss and Central Auditory Processing

This chapter will cover two very different topics. The first topic is hearing loss. For people who are born with a sense of hearing, environmental factors lead to hearing damage for everyone, and some people experience injury or illness that decreases or eliminates their sense of hearing. For people who are born without hearing, cochlear implants make hearing possible, but whether or not to join the Hearing community is often a hard choice for an individual.

The second topic is central auditory processing. The neural pathways, neural circuits, and anatomical locations that process sounds once the auditory nerve relays auditory signals from the inner ear.

This chapter was created by Sherwina Adams, Andrew Bartlett, Aliciana Bezdicek, Olivia Chareunrath, Zhijian Chen, Jacia Christiansen, Grace Cumming, Ananda Davenport, Josef Dewitt, Nicole Engelhart, Maida Fazlic, Wendy Geronimo, and Kelvin Goebel.