I was taught that long time exposure to high decimal sounds will kill the hairs in your ear perminantly harming your hearing, but is the high sounds cummulative after each time?

Question

Like if I use a saw of 100Db for 10 seconds, then go do something, then go use teh saw for another 10 seconds, have I used 20 seconds out of teh 30 minutes to casue permanet damage, or did it renew, or get weaker, or what?

In: 1

Answer 1

Yes. These are hair cells, not hairs like on your head. The hair that grows from your body is dead, composed mostly of protein, but the hair cells in your ears are like any other cells. Loud noises can damage them, but they can recover–mostly. At some point, the damage becomes cell death. The longer and louder the noise, the more likely cells will be damaged to where they cannot recover.

You can lose a decent number of those cells without detectable hearing changes–even up to half, by some estimates. But repeated exposure to loud noises can damage more and more of those cells, until you’ve reached a point where enough cells have died that you’ll have trouble hearing certain sounds, especially speech.