Tag Archives: hearing

Study explains ‘cocktail party effect’ in hearing impairment

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Source: Oregon Health & Science University

Summary: Plenty of people struggle to make sense of a multitude of converging voices in a crowded room. Commonly known as the ‘cocktail party effect,’ people with hearing loss find it’s especially difficult to understand speech in a noisy environment. New research suggests that, for some listeners, this may have less to do with actually discerning sounds. Instead, it may be a processing problem in which two ears blend different sounds together – a condition known as binaural pitch fusion.

Rest of Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210421160019.htm

Brain Cells May Press ‘Pause’ When Hearing

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The ASHA Leader, June 2015, Vol. 20, 16. doi:10.1044/leader.RIB3.20062015.16

Brain cells may be able to “wait” to determine what we hear, according to new research on gerbils at the Laboratory for Auditory Neurophysiology in Leuven, Belgium.

Human ears locate sounds in space by accounting for differences in intensity and timing between signals that reach our two ears. Cells in the brainstem, which receive electrical pulses from the auditory nerve when the cochlea hears sound, are “hyper-specialized” to respond to certain time differences, according to the lab’s Philip X. Joris, who worked with lead author Tom P. Franken on the study, published in Nature Neuroscience.

“For example, one cell may respond to sounds right in front of us, which reach both ears at the same time, while another cell may respond to sounds to our side, which reach the ears with a time difference of half a millisecond,” Joris says. “Depending on which cell is active, we know where the sound source is in space. But how cells compute this time difference has been a matter of conjecture because it is exceedingly difficult to study these cells in the brainstem.”

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