“My dear, find what you love, and let it kill you.” -Charles Bukowski.
Okay. I choose caffeine and loud concerts that will slowly make me unhealthy and eventually kill me. I’m alright with that.
Seeing your favorite band melt your face last night was pretty awesome, but now you have to wake up stupid early in the morning to go to work, so you pour a cup of coffee to get your kick. Apparently, a new study says that caffeine can actually hinder hearing recovery after being exposed to loud noises.
What?!
According to Consequence Of Sound,
What researchers found was that the group that received both caffeine and the audio overstimulation actually recovered its hearing at a significantly slower rate than the group that just heard the audio. On day eight, for example, the group just listening to too much noise saw their hearing almost fully recovered save for the 20 kHz range; the group getting caffeine and the noise, however, had issues at eight-, 16-, and 25-kHz frequencies. What’s more, the severity of the hearing changes was even worse for this group after day 15. (Click for more.)
More of the study, fancy science-y stuff, and words I can’t pronounce are found here.
I feel like as many concerts I’ve been to and the amount of coffee I drink every morning, I should have been deaf a long time ago.