Think about driving your car with the radio on, but you have a frayed wire somewhere between the radio and the speaker system. The sound is entering the perfectly operational radio but is not able to get through the wire and into the speaker in the correct way. Now replace the words radio, wire, and speaker in that sentence with the words cochlea, nerve and brain.

The sound is entering the perfectly operational cochlea but is not able to get through the nerve and into the brain in the correct way. With the bad connection you get sound fading in and out and it sounds out of sync. You can turn the volume control knob up to try and correct this but the static sound just gets louder and louder and you still can't understand most of the words because volume doesn't correct the bad connection. This is why hearing aids rarely help the auditory neuropathy child.

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