@lostdeaf
Speech recognition indeed is a brain function.
However, it heavily depends on the signal it gets. And the more messed up signal is, brain has to work significantly more, if it even manages to decipher at all.
Keep in mind that brain interprets electrical impulses, which are coming through the nerves and are made by cochlea.
Common loss is damaged cochlea.
Hearing aids work to some extent with that, while damage is moderate. Sending louder sound, hair cells which are still alive but not in top shape, get more energy and they wiggle and produce the signal. But signal is more and more messed up because of so many missing spots.
Brain will indeed get something, but might just be utterly lost to make any sense out of it.
Cochlear implant skips damaged cochlea and transfer sound to electric impulses is done by the machine outside your head and just transferred through your middle ear to the nerve.
Then brain gets clear signal again. And can decipher the meaning.
But with long wait, problem is that brain was trained to decipher grabled signal, and when it gets clearer one, it doesn’t know what to do with it. It has to be retrained.
Success of such rehabilitation heavily depends on waiting time, because statistically, the longer you were without any excitation in some frequency area, chances are bigger that brain was shut down that part of dedicated to those frequencies or reused for something else.
With brain it’s - use it or lose it.
The reason why I started with HA for bad ear (I lost hearing overnight) is because I was warned about that brain property - use it or lose it. And if anything happens with my good ear, if brain was allowed to forget about my bad ear, I’d be deaf probably.
Why I wear two aids now? Even if my good ear is really good (normal hearing). Because it puts so much less strain to understand people speaking, not to mention any streaming, than when my brain gets two different signals from each side. It’s just much more work, and is more convenient just to shut down one side.
I decided to go with two, to make my life easier. I’m 37 years old. And I went to CI evaluation for the bad ear, just to hear what future holds (eg if damage is in cochlea or also in nerve). Conclusion is that nerve is fine and one day indeed I might be CI candidate.
Which to me means that now I don’t need to think about significant changes for my career, in case I lose hearing on that side completely and there is no help anymore in form of CI. I also decided that when they give me green light for CI, I’m doing it. Because of that brain’s use it or lose it. I want the best chances.
So, individual situation is really important. I’d say, age and occupation plays big role into deciding of waiting vs do it now.
But, knowing more is always good in order to make a decision, even if decision is ‘wait until x’.
So, @ethan.coulon791 my vote goes out to ‘do CI evaluation’. Then mull over that, share information here, discuss with us. And you’ll know the answer.