 Look around a city and you'll notice the headphones. Everyone wears them, usually for hours at a time, and all our moms warn us not to listen to our headphones too loudly. But how bad is it really for us to listen all day? How much do I really need to worry about my ears? So of course our moms are right. It turns out loud music damages your hearing, but you likely won't notice any tangible effects until it's too late. In fact, any persistent noise affects your ears. Can headphones cause hearing loss? Absolutely. That's Dr. Samantha Ann, an ENT who specializes in pediatric care. So if you're blasting music or even podcasts all day long, you're going to be putting your ears at risk and you can't fix hearing loss. Once you lose the hearing loss because of noise exposure, there's no going back. You don't repair it. There's no getting it back. I called Dr. John Ogoli, an ENT and chair at USC, to learn more about how we're all ruining our hearing. So you can damage the sensory hair cells in the inner ear, or you can damage the nerves, the nerve that carries the sound from the hair cell to the brain. You know, if you listen to sounds that are too loud, then they die. And as far as we know, they don't regenerate. You also probably won't even know you're damaging your hearing because it often happens slowly and subtly. Doctors often suggest a hearing test to establish a baseline, but I'm sure you haven't had a recent hearing test. I definitely haven't. The only real obvious sign of damage is once you have ringing in your ears, aka tinnitus. That's not good because that means your hearing has been significantly damaged. Plus, ringing is obviously super annoying. All right, so we're killing our baby ear hairs and maybe damaging our nerve endings. Fantastic. But is all sound bad for us? That can't be possible, right? If you're listening to a really loud sound, the time you can listen to it is less. Or if it's a medium level sound, then you can listen to it much longer. He and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have some concrete decibel recommendations. If you listen to something at 85 decibels, for example, you can safely do so for eight hours. This is like hearing a garbage disposal blender or dishwasher for eight hours. It's not so bad. At 95 decibels, you'll only get four safe hours of listening. That's slightly louder than a motorcycle that's 25 feet away. Imagine that for four hours. It's brutal. You want to almost never hear a chainsaw, which can top out at 120 decibels. Now, I recognize that most of us don't think in decibel levels. I'm impressed if you do. But if you're curious, apps do exist to measure your decibel level outputs, although there are other ways to measure decibel outputs that are more abstract. General guidelines, keep it at a comfortable level, should not be heard around you. And then, you know, if you take it off and you're hearing ringing or the sound is a little bit muffled, like when you come out of a huge concert, for example, and you have a little bit of ringing and muffled sound for a while, that's actually damage to the hearing. Of course, our headphones can affect this problem too. Noise isolation, which is when our headphones block out ambient sound because of the seal they create, can help reduce the need for louder music. Noise cancellation, which electronically counteracts outside noise, can help too. The two taken together might make a big difference. When used properly to lower the levels of decibels that you're playing, noise-canceling headphones are not a bad thing. They could be helpful. Dr. Oghalai says regular old earbuds might be the worst, as does Dr. Anne. The type of earbuds that kind of sit in the bowl of your ear that you can still hear outside sounds are probably, in my mind, some of the worst ones you could have. Both agree that noise cancellation can help, although if you're using noise cancellation as an excuse to tone everything out and then turn up your music, don't do that. That's really bad. Okay, so I wanted to see how loudly I listen to music. So we went out into the world to see how loud New York City truly is. We used a sound level meter to detect the outside volume level and then looked at how I adjusted my volume on my iPhone and turned. We tested one over-the-ear pair, one noise-canceling, one noise-isolating, AirPods, noise-canceling earbuds, and on-ear headphones. The subway was super loud whenever trains were present, and sometimes it even reached up to 100 decibels, but it wasn't too bad when there were no trains in the station. The outside city was about as loud as when there were no subways in the station, but sometimes it did get a little bit louder, like when an ambulance drove by. And the office was always more or less silent. Obviously, this all affected how loud I needed to turn up my music, but all the headphones stuck to a clear pattern I've used, regardless of where I was. I had to turn my regular over-the-ear headphones up the highest, as well as my AirPods. The noise-isolating headphones and noise-canceling headphones really did a good job keeping external sounds out, which led me to keep the volume lower than I had to with other pairs. But even with these noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones, the subway station volume was nearly double that of the office. This all makes sense. But as the doctors warned, we could easily overdo it with volume, especially when the headphones are able to keep sounds out. All we can do to take care of our ears is be mindful. Maybe give up on your vanity and wear earplugs at concerts, because you never ever want to hear that ringing. If you're a parent, you can often set volume controls for your kids so that they don't exceed a certain decibel level. It's okay to use the headphones, but just be smart about it. Be sensible. Dr. Oghalai thinks the future might actually be bright when it comes to hearing loss. Better headphone technology could reduce the amount of damage we do. It's actually going to get better over our lifetimes, because I think headphones have gotten better. If he has hope, so do I. Hey, do you have anything you've been wondering about related to tech and myths, maybe? Leave them in the comments below, because we're always looking for ideas. Also, we just launched a new Verge Science YouTube page that you should absolutely go check out, so go do that.