Your ability to listen to a phone message in one ear while a friend is talking into your other ear — and comprehend what both are saying — is an important communication skill that’s heavily influenced by your genes, say researchers of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health. The finding, published in the August 2007 issue of Human Genetics, may help researchers better understand a broad and complex group of disorders — called auditory processing disorders (APDs) — in which individuals with otherwise normal hearing ability have trouble making sense of the sounds around them.
