How Songbirds May Help Build a Better Hearing Aid
University of California, Berkeley/January, 2015
Untreated hearing loss can have devastating and alienating repercussions on a person’s life: isolation, depression, sapped cognition, even dementia.
Yet only one in five Americans who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wears one. Some don’t seek help because their loss has been so gradual that they do not feel impaired. Others cannot afford the device. Many own hearing aids but leave them in a drawer. Wearing them is just too unpleasant.
“In a crowded place, it can be very difficult to follow a conversation even if you don’t have hearing deficits,” says UC Berkeley neuroscientist Frederic Theunissen. “That situation can be terrible for a person wearing a hearing aid, which amplifies everything.”
Imagine the chaotic din in which everything is equally amplified: your friend’s voice, the loud people a few tables over, and the baby crying across the room.
In that scenario, the friend’s voice is the signal, or sound that the listener is trying to hear. Tuning in to signal sounds, even with background noise, is something that healthy human brains and ears do remarkably well. The question for Theunissen — a professor who focuses on auditory perception — was how to make a hearing aid that processes sound the way the brain does.
“We were inspired by the biology of hearing,” Theunissen said. “How does the brain do it?”