DUI Defender

A recent study linking listening and learning to specific performance has found that as many as 7% of the population may have a problem “connecting the dots” between what they hear and what they are expected to do with what they hear. “The finding 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. 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,” James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD said.

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 realize 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.”

As a theory this may help explain how young, healthy persons with low blood alcohol concentrations perform poorly on field sobriety exercizes.

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