Spring 2015
Seminars are held at 11:30AM in Cullimore Hall, Room 611, unless noted otherwise. For questions about the seminar schedule, please contact Casey Diekman.
Date: April 21, 2015
Speaker: Antje Ihlefeld
Department of Biomedical Engineering,
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Title: "Hearing Loss and the Brain"
Abstract:
Imagine yourself in a noisy place, such as a cafe or in a pub, engaged in a conversation with a friend. If you have normal hearing, your brain routinely tracks what your friend is saying and you probably do not even notice the interfering sound sources. For individuals with hearing loss, however, the ability to listen in background noise is much reduced or absent as compared to normally hearing listeners, resulting in reduced speech intelligibility. This outcome is commonly attributed to cochlear dysfunction. However, a principal corollary of hearing impairment, sound deprivation, also alters central nervous system function. Indeed, sound deprivation can alter membrane and synaptic properties across the entire auditory central nervous system, and may reduce behavioral sensitivity. Here, a series of experiments investigated the role of central processing deficits on listening in background sound, both in profoundly deaf individuals whose hearing was restored via cochlear implants, and in a rodent model of auditory processing, the Mongolian gerbil.