Imagine you’re sitting in a crowded cafeteria. Forks clatter. Chairs scrape. Someone laughs at the table behind you. Across from you, a friend is talking. You can see their mouth moving, but the words just don’t make sense.
You can hear something. You just can’t understand it. Have you ever heard someone talking…and still not understood a word they said?
That’s what hearing loss can sound like.
And that’s why this podcast exists.
Welcome to Can You Hear Me?, a podcast about hearing loss, how it affects people, and the science working to understand and treat it.
My name is Rishi, and I’ve always been fascinated by sound—how we hear it, how we lose it, and how much of our lives depend on it. As a violinist, sound and music have played a huge part of my life. Watching one of my close family members struggle with hearing loss, I realized how lucky I am to hear with no issues. That inspired me to start this podcast.
During our time together, we’ll look at hearing loss from various angles: its effects socially, how it’s treated, and what the hot research in the field is. We’ll also interview experts across disciplines to see how they are contributing their unique expertise.
So, let me make it clear—this isn’t just a podcast about ears.
When most people hear the phrase “hearing loss,” they imagine silence. Total quiet.
But for most people, hearing loss doesn’t mean silence at all.
It means hearing everything, but understanding nothing.
Voices blend together. Background noise overwhelms speech. Conversations become exhausting to try and understand. That’s why turning the volume up doesn’t fix the problem all the time.
Hearing loss is often about clarity, not loudness.
And because you and I can’t see it, it’s one of the most misunderstood health conditions out there.
Hearing loss isn’t rare. And it isn’t just something that happens when you’re old.
It affects kids in classrooms, musicians on stage, and even teens like me with their AirPods turned up just a little too loud.
Sound shapes how we learn, how we socialize, and how we perceive the world. And yet, hearing loss is often ignored until it becomes impossible to.
The truth is, almost everyone is at risk, and most people don’t realize it.
So what’s actually happening inside the ear to cause this?
Normally, sound is caught by the auricle, the thing on the side of your head, which acts like a funnel. Sound then travels through the ear canal, vibrating the ear drum. This moves the ossicles, three tiny bones in the middle ear, which vibrate fluid in the cochlea. Inside the cochlea are microscopic hair cells that convert vibrations into electrical signals that travel to the brain.
So, hearing is definitely not a simple endeavor. There’s a lot of steps that go into hearing normally, and if any of them stop working…it’s an issue. The type of hearing loss someone has is dependent on what specific step is having trouble. We’ll go into more specifics in another episode, but for today, I want to focus on the most common one.
I mentioned cochlear hair cells. These aren’t actual hair cells like the ones you would find on your head. We call them that because each cell has tiny projections that look like hairs called stereocilia, which sway with the cochlea’s fluid vibrations. Once those hair cells are damaged, they don’t grow back. This is the issue plaguing over one billion—that’s right, billion with a “b”—people worldwide with sensorineural hearing loss. Even worse, the World Health Organization estimates that over 60% of these cases are preventable.
But that’s where new research comes in: hearing devices, implants, and even gene therapy. We’re closer than ever to understanding hearing loss, and that comes with innovative ways of treating it.
But hearing loss doesn’t just affect hearing. It affects confidence. Relationships. Mental health.
It means constantly asking people to repeat themselves, or pretending you understood when you didn’t. It means feeling left out of conversations you want to be part of. And because of stigma, many people wait years before getting help. And in developing countries, people unfortunately don’t have access to these kind of treatments in many regions, which is one reason why so many cases of hearing loss are preventable.
But hearing loss isn’t anything to be ashamed of. It’s a medical condition, and it deserves attention.
That’s what Can You Hear Me? is about.
I break down the science, share real stories, and talk to the people pushing this field forward.
In the next episodes, we’ll talk about current treatments for hearing loss—hearing aids, cochlear implants—to cutting-edge research, and everything in between. I know we didn’t dive into anything specific today, and that’s because I really just wanted to give an overview of what this podcast is going to discuss.
So to wrap things up, I’ll leave you with a question that will guide the next episodes: what does hearing really mean to you?
This is Rishi, and I’ll see you in the next episode of Can You Hear Me?