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Electrocochleography measures the auditory nerve and cochlea. The auditory brain stem response and tests may be used to measure individuals hearing who may not or will not voluntarily respond to sound. For instance, such tests are used to determine whether children and infants have profound loss of hearing and whether an individual is exaggerating or faking hearing loss (called psychogenic hypacusis). In some cases, such a test may help find out the sensorineural hearing loss cause. Auditory brain stem responses also may be used to monitor specific brain functions in individuals who undergo brain surgery or who are comatose. Some hearing tests may reveal disorders in the brain’s auditory processing regions. Such tests measure the ability to understand and interpret distorted speech, to find where the sounds come from, when they are present in both ears at the same time, to fuse incomplete messages to each person’s ear into a meaningful message, and to understand a message presented in 1 ear when a competing message is presented to another ear. Because the pathways of the nerve from each ear cross to the other brain’s side, an abnormality on one brain’s side affect hearing in the other ear’s side. Brain stem lesion may impair the abilities to fuse noncomplete messages into meaningful messages and to pinpoint where the sounds are coming from.
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