There appears to be a higher incidence of auditory processing difficulty in individuals with ASD and there is also a small but growing set of users with normal hearing who use hearing aids to help manage auditory processing issues. Research supporting this is still pretty limited and weak (but not non-existant), but clinics are starting to play around with implementing it. I think in some cases with ASD, and you can certainly correct me, auditory issues are sometimes less about loud spaces than they are about auditorily busy spaces. All the signals come in over top of eachother and it gets hard to segregate them and attend to the target signal (this can very much be the case as hearing loss progresses, too). Hearing aids can help to boost the targets signal above the other signals, and emphasize/clarify some of the critical pieces of the target signal, and in that way can make things easier. But experience may vary and yes it could go the other way–hearing aids take a bit of practice to get used to.
It won’t do anything to change what is happening in the ear, but it helps to maintain normal organization of auditory brain regions. The brain doesn’t like waste, so when areas are going un-used (for example, the areas that would normally have responded to certain frequencies which you now just aren’t hearing well) those connections will start to down-regulate and other areas of the brain may start to come in and take over that space and disrupt the normal organization of the auditory areas which can then be difficult to get back.
Not if the hearing aids are properly fit.
This is an interesting question that I’m not sure that I have a clear answer to this morning, but I can offer a couple of different angles to try to get at it. Children with auditory processing difficulties sometimes have weak neural synchrony. If you think of the auditory nerve, for example, it is made up of thousands of neurons sending signals to the brain and when functioning well the neurons all send their messages together in a synchonized way to create one big clear signal further upstream in the brain that is easy for the brain to use. Imagine maybe a crowd of people all saying the same thing, but the effect of them all saying it in perfect unison rather than saying it with variable timing–the message is more clearly received with the former situation. Giving these children consistent access to clear, audible speech (say, through the use of a remote microphone system in the classroom) appears to promote the development of better neural synchrony that then generalizes to other situations. Then, rather than spending their energy struggling to hear in class, these children can learn. It IS the case that people who practice listening in complex situations (for example, air traffic controllers, musicians, perhaps school teachers) develop better skills and are better able to decode speech in these situations that people who don’t practice it regularly, but they all also have a sturdy foundation of good neural synchrony and basic auditory processing upon which to base these other skills, and they also aren’t always in these complex situations, they are sometimes in quiet situations with clear speech to reinforce those basics. Individuals with unaided hearing loss are constantly missing out during even basic listening exposures. Now to skip to the side a little bit. . . people with hearing loss do sometimes get practiced at filling in the blanks. It does not appear to be a function of their auditory system, but rather other cognitive areas stepping in to do the work that the auditory system cannot do without access to that missing sound. When these people get hearing aids, this work starts to be done in the auditory system again and other cognitive areas are freed up to do other stuff. So maybe think about breaking your leg and becoming very skilled with crutches–yes it is the case that you develop some strong crutch-using skills, but now your hands are often busier when they might be useful for other tasks and you’d probably prefer to just walk if you could. You might say, “aren’t the hearing aids the crutch?” But in the case of hearing loss the leg (the ear) is never going to get better so you have to make a choice to either crutch it with the hearing aids or with the brain, and maybe you want your brain free for other things. Relatedly, one of the consenquences of hearing loss is fatigue. Having to expend extra effort to fill in the blanks all the time is cognitively fatiguing, and takes away from ones ability to do other things that one might prefer to do. Similarly, if you have normal hearing but auditory processing difficulty, spending time in a busy auditory environment is much more fatiguing than it is for someone with stronger auditory skills. (Note that there are of course other things that can be fatiguing about these busy auditory environments–my ears don’t tend to get tired but my social battery drains very quickly and sometimes those things can be hard to pick apart.)
So in various ways, no, it’s not better to be challenging the auditory system with auditory deprivation all the time.
That all said, it’s probably worthwhile to go get an official assessment. The loss in your avatar is edging out of the grey zone and into the hearing aid zone, but your lows in particular might look way better with a real hearing test.
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