Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody goth. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about some of the

most common causes for hearing loss and how you can protect your ears from them from author

David Owen. You'll also learn about how woolly mammoth DNA has given us new insight into

what made them go extinct. Let's tell us about some curiosity.

You're never too young to start protecting your ears.

And you're about to learn some tips for protecting yourself from hearing loss.

Our guest is David Owen, author of the new book Volume Control, Hearing in a Deffening World.

You can hear the first part of our conversation on last Wednesday's episode of Curiosity Daily,

and I'll put a link to that in today's show notes in case you missed it.

And now, part two.

We want to protect our ears, but I'm not going to walk around with ear plugs in all the time, right?

So like, what's the number one cause of hearing loss and when is it most important to safeguard your hearing?

Well, it's definitely the loudest sounds that we're exposed to.

There are also other causes of hearing loss, are people who lose, you know, for genetic reasons or they had the they had a disease, a viral disease that harm their hearing. I have two friends who lost hearing because of chemotherapy drug that they were taking, which is known to be

what's called ototoxic, which means that it can be toxic to hearing.

So there are many causes, but the main cause of what's called censural hearing loss, the commonest kind of hearing

law, is exposure to loud sound

and over a course of a lifetime.

So the sounds to worry the most about

are the loudestest most sustained ones.

There are people who work in industries where they are exposed to sound like that all the time.

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