Engineering: Listening to two things at once is an inheritable trait

Your genes influence the ability to have a phone conversation in one ear and listen to an interrupting friend in the other, according to new US research.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health in the US, published this finding in the August 2007 issue of Human Genetics.

The discovery may help researchers better understand a broad and complex group of disorders — called auditory processing disorders (APDs) — in which individuals with otherwise normal hearing ability have trouble making sense of the sounds around them.

"Our auditory system doesn’t end with our ears - it also includes the part of our brain that helps us interpret the sounds we hear," said James Battey Jr, Director of the NIDCD.

"This is the first study to show that people vary widely in their ability to process what they hear, and these differences are due largely to heredity."

The term 'auditory processing' refers to functions performed primarily by the brain that help a listener interpret sounds.

Among other things, auditory processing enables us to tell the direction a sound is coming from, the timing and sequence of a sound, and whether a sound is a voice we need to listen to or background noise we should ignore.

Most people don’t even realise they possess these skills, much less how adept they are at them.

Auditory processing skills play a role in a child’s language acquisition and learning abilities, although the extent of that relationship is not well understood.

Twins used to test listening ability

To determine if auditory processing skills are hereditary, NIDCD researchers studied identical and fraternal twins who attended a national twins festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, during the years 2002 through 2005.

A total of 194 same-sex pairs of twins participated in the study (138 identical pairs and 56 fraternal pairs), with ages from 12 through 50.

All twins received a DNA test to confirm whether they were identical or fraternal and a hearing test to make sure they had normal hearing.

If a trait is purely genetic, identical twins, who share the same DNA, will be alike nearly 100 per cent of the time, while fraternal twins, who share roughly half of their DNA, will be less similar.

Conversely, if a trait is primarily due to a person’s environment, both identical and fraternal twins should have roughly the same degree of similarity, since most twins grow up in the same household.

Scientists believe that problems with multiple listening ability are often due to a lesion or disconnect between the brain's right and left hemispheres.

When we listen to someone talking, speech entering the right ear travels in large part to the left side of the brain, where language is processed.

Speech entering the left ear travels first to the right side of the brain before crossing to the brain’s language centre on the left side by way of the corpus callosum, a pathway connecting the brain's right and left hemispheres.

The finding that normal twins show wide variation in their dichotic listening abilities, and that the differences are mostly due to genetic variation, adds a new perspective to our understanding of auditory processing disorders.

These disorders may affect as many as seven per cent of school-aged children in the United States and often appear alongside language and learning disorders, including dyslexia.

APDs also affect older adults and stroke victims and can limit the successfulness of hearing aids in the treatment of hearing loss.

The researchers suggest that scientists may be able to fine-tune their understanding of what an APD is and the role these disorders play in the development of language and learning disorders.

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