 Welcome to World Hearing Facts. My name is Susanna Love, and this week, we at Otacon celebrate your hearing and bring you some curious, quirky, and hopefully new to you facts about your hearing and brain health. This year's theme for World Hearing Day is to hear for life, listen with care. In other words, it's all about protecting your hearing from early childhood through old age. Have you ever heard the saying, we hear with our brains, not our ears? Our brains tell us when we've heard a sound, and that's why it's crucial that sound has a clear and unhindered path from when it enters our ears until our brains say, I heard that. And did you know our brains scan the sounds around us four times per second? That way, we're always alerted to dangers. Or we instantly know when someone behind us is trying to get our attention. Our brains work brilliantly when they continuously receive clear messaging from our ears, but sometimes we can lose our ability to hear because they weren't protected enough from damaging noise levels. And that brings us back to this year's theme to hear for life, listen with care. Keeping your ears and brain protected means that you can continue to join in an interesting conversation, sing along to your favorite song, or even just the kitchen timer when it goes off, or a beautiful bird call outside. Sounds give access to life. And that's it for now. Join me for episode two of World Hearing Facts, where we'll talk about that little ringing sound that you hear in your ear once in a while, what that actually means. Thank you for listening.