Understanding hearing through deafness
- House Ear Institute, 2100 West Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90057
Twenty-five years ago, many people thought that auditory prostheses were too crude to ever benefit auditory neuroscience. One skeptic thought that trying to understand auditory processing by using the artificial pattern of neural activation through a cochlear implant was like trying to understand how a television tuner works by applying a lightning bolt to the antenna. Recent papers in PNAS (1, 11) have shown the gains auditory prostheses have made in 25 years, in terms of practical benefit (i.e., restoring hearing to deaf people) and as a valuable tool for neuroscience. In this issue of PNAS, Rouger et al. (1) show that deaf people have superior lip-reading abilities and superior audiovisual integration compared with those with normal hearing and that they maintain superior lip-reading performance even after cochlear implantation. The development of the cochlear implant allowed for this unique perspective on auditory and visual integration.
Cochlear Implants and Neuroscience
The everyday act of listening to someone talk presents a complex problem for neuroscience. The auditory signal initiates a complex cascade of neural events, culminating in the parsing and categorization of the auditory neural stream into words and sentences. In parallel, the visual system processes images of the talker. The auditory and visual streams are merged into a multisensory signal that allows for better recognition in difficult conditions (e.g., noise) than by either modality alone. How auditory and visual streams are parsed and combined has been the subject of …
*E-mail: bshannon{at}hei.org
