One of hearing loss’s most puzzling mysteries may have been solved by scientists from the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the revelation could result in the overhauling of the design of future hearing aids.
The long standing idea that voices are singled out by neural processing has been debunked by an MIT study. According to the study, it may actually be a biochemical filter that allows us to tune in to individual sound levels.
How Our Ability to Hear is Affected by Background Noise
Only a small fraction of the millions of individuals who suffer from hearing loss actually use hearing aids to manage it.
Though a major boost in one’s ability to hear can be the result of using a hearing aid, environments with a lot of background noise have traditionally been an issue for people who wear a hearing improvement device. A person’s ability to discriminate voices, for example, can be seriously reduced in settings like a party or restaurant where there is a steady din of background noise.
Having a discussion with someone in a crowded room can be stressful and annoying and individuals who suffer from hearing loss know this all too well.
Scientists have been closely studying hearing loss for decades. The way that sound waves move through the ear and how those waves are differentiated, due to this body of research, was thought to be well understood.
Scientists Discover The Tectorial Membrane
But the tectorial membrane wasn’t identified by scientists until 2007. You won’t see this microscopic membrane made of a gel-like material in any other parts of the body. The deciphering and delineation of sound is achieved by a mechanical filtering performed by this membrane and that might be the most fascinating thing.
Minute in size, the tectorial membrane rests on delicate hairs inside the cochlea, with small pores that manage how water moves back and forth in reaction to vibrations. Researchers noticed that different tones reacted differently to the amplification produced by the membrane.
The middle frequencies were found to have strong amplification and the tones at the lower and higher ends of the spectrum were less affected.
Some scientists believe that more effective hearing aids that can better distinguish individual voices will be the outcome of this groundbreaking MIT study.
The Future of Hearing Aid Design
For years, the basic design principles of hearing aids have remained fairly unchanged. Adjustments and fine-tuning have helped with some enhancements, but the majority of hearing aids are essentially comprised of microphones that pick up sounds and a loudspeaker that amplifies them. This is, unfortunately, where the shortcoming of this design becomes obvious.
Amplifiers, usually, are unable to differentiate between different levels of sounds, because of this, the ear receives increased levels of all sounds, including background noise. Another MIT scientist has long thought tectorial membrane exploration could result in new hearing aid designs that offer better speech recognition for wearers.
The user of these new hearing aids could, theoretically, tune in to an individual voice as the hearing aid would be able to tune specific frequencies. Only the chosen frequencies would be amplified with these hearing aids and everything else would be left alone.
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References
https://www.machinedesign.com/motion-control/researchers-discover-secret-how-we-can-pick-out-voice-crowd
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/16/c_137749535.htm
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2010-11-tuning-mechanism.html