Not just bad for your ears, noise is bad for your health. There is no escaping noise. It’s everywhere in our daily lives. One study found that employees working in noisy environments performed poorer on memory tests and reported increased levels of fatigue than colleagues working in low-noise environments. Damage to the auditory nerve impairs our brain’s ability to separate speech from noise, which is why understanding speech in background noise is difficult for someone with hearing loss. Today’s hearing aids use complex algorithms to boost speech signals in noise, making understanding speech easier for someone wearing hearing aids.