Tuning in to a new hearing mechanism
More than 30 million Americans suffer from hearing loss, and about 6 million wear hearing aids. While those devices can boost the intensity of sounds coming into the ear, they are often ineffective in loud environments such as restaurants, where you need to pick out the voice of your dining companion from background noise.To do that, you need to be able to distinguish sounds with subtle differences. The human ear is exquisitely adapted for that task, but the underlying mechanism responsible for this selectivity has remained unclear. Now, new findings from MIT researchers reveal an entirely new mechanism by which the human ear sorts sounds, a discovery that could lead to improved, next-generation assistive hearing devices.“We’ve incorporated into hearing aids everything we know about how sounds are sorted, but they’re still not very effective in problematic environments such as restaurants, or anywhere there are competing speakers,” says Dennis Freeman, MIT...