One of hearing loss’s most perplexing mysteries may have been solved by scientists from the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the insight could result in the overhauling of the design of future hearing aids.
Results from an MIT study debunked the idea that neural processing is what allows us to pick out voices. According to the study, it might actually be a biochemical filter that enables us to tune in to specific sound levels.
How Our Ability to Hear is Affected by Background Noise
Only a small portion of the millions of individuals who cope with 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 typically been a problem for people who wear a hearing improvement device. A person’s ability to discriminate voices, for instance, can be drastically limited in settings like a party or restaurant where there is a constant din of background noise.
If you’re a person who is afflicted with hearing loss, you most likely understand how annoying and upsetting it can be to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody in a crowded room.
For decades scientists have been studying hearing loss. The way that sound waves move through the ear and how those waves are differentiated, due to this body of research, was believed to be well understood.
Scientists Identify The Tectorial Membrane
But the tectorial membrane wasn’t identified by scientists until 2007. The ear is the only place on the body you will find this gel-like membrane. What really fascinated scientists was how the membrane supplies mechanical filtering that can decipher and delineate between sounds.
When vibration enters the ear, the minute tectorial membrane manages how water moves in response using small pores as it rests on little hairs in the cochlea. Researchers noticed that different tones reacted differently to the amplification produced by the membrane.
The middle tones were found to have strong amplification and the frequencies at the lower and higher ends of the scale were less affected.
It’s that progress that leads some scientists to believe MIT’s groundbreaking discovery could be the conduit to more effective hearing aids that ultimately allow for better single-voice recognition.
The Future of Hearing Aid Design
For years, the general design principles of hearing aids have remained fairly unchanged. Tweaks and fine-tuning have helped with some enhancements, but the majority of hearing aids are basically made up of microphones that receive sounds and a loudspeaker that amplifies them. Regrettably, that’s where one of the design’s drawbacks becomes apparent.
Amplifiers, typically, are unable to differentiate between different frequencies of sounds, because of this, the ear receives increased levels of all sounds, that includes background noise. Tectorial membrane research could, according to another MIT scientist, result in new, innovative hearing aid designs which would provide better speech recognition.
The user of these new hearing aids could, theoretically, tune in to an individual voice as the hearing aid would be able to tune distinct frequencies. Only the desired 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