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YouTube member sloanchurman was born deaf. Now 29 years old, her husband recorded the moment her hearing implant is activated. She explained in the YouTube comments:
“I had an implant put in 8 weeks ago called The Esteem Implant by Envoy Medical. I was born deaf and have worn hearing aids from the age of 2, but hearing aids only help so much. I have gotten by this long in life by reading lips. This was taken as they were activating the implant.”
-via reddit
Previously: 8-Month Baby Hears for First Time
According to a new study published in Nature, our skin helps us decipher the sounds we hear with our ears. Blindfolded volunteers listened to the “pa”, “ta”, “da”, and “ba” sounds. Unknown to the participant, a puff of air, softer than would be felt in normal conversation, accompanied some of the sounds. Sometimes the puff of air accompanied the appropriate sounds, at other times not.
The researchers found that if there was no air puff, participants misheard “pa” for “ba” and “ta” for “da” 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when an air puff over the hand or neck accompanied “pa” and “ta.” No improvement occurred, however, if an air puff was sent through the tube in the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.
The opposite effect was observed when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds— “ba” and “da.” While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80 percent of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.
Most of the volunteers were not consciously aware of the puffs of air. Link
With sound sources bouncing off walls and other surfaces, how is the brain able to sort out from what direction and distance sound is traveling? Robert Goodier explains:
In an April study, neuroscientists led by Sasha Devore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested the widely held hypothesis that specialized cells in the brain actively suppress neuronal response to echoes. Using electrodes in a cat’s midbrain, researchers measured cells’ responses to a sound and its reverberations. They found that the cells that sense a sound’s direction of origin responded more strongly to the first 50 milliseconds of sound waves than they did to the later waves—their activity simply tapered off after the onset of the sound. The tapering response, a much simpler mechanism than the earlier theory of suppression, allows the brain to easily tune in to original sounds and pinpoint who or what is making noise.
Image by flickr user mystical child used under creative commons license
Can you hear the sound in the clip at this site? I can’t, but that’s not surprising. It can generally only be heard by people under the age of 25. Those who can hear it say it’s pretty annoying. Some older folks use it to repel teens, but some young people use it for a ring tone. Link -via Digg
A 20-something woman in China recently had her left ear drum blown out by a massive kiss. She has become partially deaf as a result of the passionate kiss.
Chinese media companies are now spreading warnings about the dangers of kissing. It seems it is pretty easy for any kiss to blow out an ear drum because pressure can be imbalanced between the two ears, which can lead to one of the drums breaking.
Link Photo via Bob.Fornal [Flickr]
