They recommend holding personal audio device usage to less than an hour a day. Woof. We headphone lovers on this forum are gonna struggle with that one.
Thanks for sharing though. Also, their graphic makes it look like concert bands are flinging wifi icons about 
Yeahhhhhhhhhh no lol
I thought that permissible SPLs were reported based on continuous use. Meaning, 85db causes hearing loss if you listen for 8 hours continuously with no breaks. This WHO pamphlet makes it sound like itâs just 8 hours per day. To me that sounds like any discontinuous listening time summing to 8 hours out of 24 is problematic. Has that always been true and I just missed something somewhere?
I agree that they are a little too vague on the time limit and whatever. Honestly I just thought it was interesting to share lol, but their recommendations are a little too limited, and that clearly shows with the reactions to that snippet of text lmao
Relax, itâs worse than we thought. Theyâve just recently been discovering this new type of hearing loss that happens at lower decibels. 
Even for people with excellent, pain-free hearing, the creeping loudness of our surroundings is having a steadily withering effect â one largely unknown to audiologists before 2009. In the last 10 years, new research shows that people whose hearing appears as totally normal during clinical tests can already be suffering from significant hearing damage. The name of this condition: hidden hearing loss.
Anyone living with it is still able to detect sounds at different frequencies and volumes, which means a standard audiogram administered at the doctorâs office isnât enough to make a diagnosis. But for those with hidden hearing loss, acing a test at the doctorâs office doesnât translate to understanding what a friend is telling them while sitting together in a bustling restaurant.
âYou can have this hidden hearing loss by being exposed to sounds that we donât necessarily consider traumatic,â says Paul Fuchs, an auditory researcher and professor of otolaryngology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Sound levels on a city street arenât thought of as traumatic, but they can be enough.
Hair cells within the cochlea, that snail-shape structure of the inner ear, are responsible for picking up sounds, and each individual hair cell of the thousands present connects to about 20 neurons in the brain. Typically, hearing loss happens as hair cells wither away over time.
But in people with hidden hearing loss, the hair cells of the inner ear are fine; itâs why people with the condition can take a standard hearing test and pass. Whatâs snapped, instead, are the connections, the synapses that carry the electrical signals of sound from the hair cells to the nerve cells of the brain
When there were once 20 neurons connected to each hair cell but now there are maybe only 10 connections, it directly affects the quality of the sound the brain is processing. âYou can hear a church bell, but itâs not the same as making out stump versus bump in a crowd,â says Pollard.
Itâs still tough to say just how many people have hidden hearing loss â Kujawa says no estimates are available. But since the discovery a decade ago, the condition has been observed in multiple animals as well as aging humans.
âThe question is no longer whether it occurs, but under what conditions and with what functional consequences,â says Kujawa. âThese are the early days, and many questions remain unanswered.â
More research is being done to devise a good test by which to measure hidden hearing loss in people, but by auditory specialistsâ best guesses, the condition is on the rise â because the sounds we live around every day are capable of causing it.
https://elemental.medium.com/you-might-be-losing-your-hearing-and-you-dont-even-know-it-b621f6b4aadd
Sooo⌠donât take that 85 dB threshold as gospel, and just keep your total exposure as low as is practical.
Re: apps you can use, despite Androidâs reputation for hardware inconsistency, Iâve found this Sound Meter app gives pretty close values to a dedicated meter I bought online. From the reviews it would seem all apps by âSmart Tools coâ are well calibrated somehow and give good results on a lot of phones.
I donât know who told me that but yeah, you mostly notice youâre losing your hearing when you canât have a conversation with someone in a loud environment. I donât think itâs news?
Also I donât think synapses âsnapâ. Or at least, I heard stories of burn-outs, people working in the music industry, who could not hear anything for a few days, and it comes back. Yup, the brain can do that when youâre way too tired apparently! Temporarily blocking sound as a defense mechanism.
So, yeah, we know hearing loss can be permanent, when sound hurts your ears. But I believe this synapses thing can heal/reconnect.
Itâs probably news because theyâre actually finding how it happens, i.e. synapses snap.
Sounds like the people studying this stuff for a living have found that they do, and that itâs permanent at least insofar as our environmental noise (and voluntary exposure) remains permanently elevated. If you suddenly decided to move to the mountains and become a monk, your synapses might recover, who knows. 
Iâm 100% certain about that, what Iâm worried about is journalism and poor wording. Lol.
âThe human brain keeps changing throughout a personâs lifetime. Researchers have now been able to ascribe the formation of new neural networks in the visual cortex to a simple homeostatic rule.â (âŚ)
âIn this region of the brain, about 10 % of the synapses are continuously regenerated. When the retina is damaged, this percentage increases even further.â
(i.e.: Synapses auto-regenerate, at least for the visual cortex).
"Researchers only recently found out that even in the adult brain, not only do existing synapses adapt to new circumstances, but new connections are constantly formed and reorganized. "
Source: PLoS Computational Biology, 2013.
Oh the capacity exists, to be sure, you can have direct functional regeneration or reallocation of different brain areas, like with âphantom limbsâ and related phenomena. But itâs affected by overall health/age and definitely wonât give you the same effect if you continue/discontinue your exposure to synapse-breaking influences.
I went to my first concert a few months ago and I regret leaving my ear plugs I brought in the car. My left ear was ringing for 2 days straight. (My left ear was closer to the speaker than my right.)
In future wad up a piece of paper and chew it soft, then use to create make-shift earplugs. Apparently, does the job.