What is it like to hear with a bionic ear?
Drs. Christopher Long and Bob Carlyon are studying how people hear with a “bionic ear” known as a cochlear implant. This device provides a sense of hearing to patients whose hearing loss is so great that they receive little or no benefit from traditional hearing aids. Sound is picked up by a microphone worn behind the ear, digitally processed, and transmitted to a device beneath the skin, which then stimulates an array of electrodes that has been surgically implanted in the inner ear. These electrodes then directly stimulate the auditory nerve. Although many cochlear implant users communicate well in quiet, they still report great difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations. Our overall goal is to understand how one could overcome this problem. As well as performing experiments with implant users, we have developed acoustic simulations which, we think, produce a pattern of activation in the auditory nerves of normal-hearing subjects that is similar to that produced by a cochlea
