My Perspective

In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question:  Could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? A scientific study [1] actually answered this question by conducting an experiment on the congenitally blind who have just been given the ability to see. They reported that such subjects could not distinguish a cube from a sphere by sight alone after their sight was restored, but they could rapidly learn to distinguish these shapes. I ask a related question here: Could someone who was born deaf (congenitally), and able to distinguish a snare drum from a cymbal by touch alone, be able to immediately distinguish and name these musical instruments by their sound alone (without seeing or feeling them) if given the ability to hear? I think the latest study published in Nat...

People with age-related hearing-loss commonly experience difficulty in understanding speech in noisy situations, like social gatherings e.g. cocktail parties, café, or restaurants.  Earlier scientific studies have established that the ability to segregate and group overlapping generic artificial sounds (not words in any language) is related to the ability to understand speech in social chatter. In my recent study [1], I non-invasively recorded electrical activity from the brain (using EEG technique) while the subjects performed a relevant task (sound segregation and grouping) and irrelevant task (a visual task). I compared the electrical signals evoked from the brain during segregation and grouping of non-linguistics artificial sounds against when trying to understand speech amidst (babble) noise. I established that the electrical brain activity generated during real-world listening is similar to that of artificial sound segregation done passively without paying atte...

More than half the world's population above the age of 75 years develop age-related hearing loss. They report difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments which is a critical everyday task, like when listening to someone speak in a noisy cafe. But the ability to understand speech amidst background noise varies widely among people. Question : Why do some people struggle with speech perception in noise despite having clinically defined normal hearing?

Our brain needs to perceive the world around us by hearing and recreating it in our mind. This requires that our brain has a way of identifying any new sound as it appears, separating it from other sounds that are present and finally representing it as a distinct object in our mind. An important question in understanding how the brain recreates an 'auditory scene' is therefore: how does the brain detects appearance of new sounds?