A new UC San Francisco (UCSF) study that mapped the neural connections of newborns with two different kinds of brain injuries found the maps looked very different – and were linked to significantly different developmental outcomes years later.
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In a study reported December 14 in the journal “Nature Communications,” researchers led by McGovern Institute for Brain Research associate investigator Josh McDermott used computational modeling to explore factors that influence how humans hear pitch.
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Speech sounds elicit comparable neural responses and stimulate the same region in the brain of humans, macaques, and guinea pigs, a multidisciplinary group of University of Pittsburgh researchers reported in the journal “eNeuro.” The finding could help pave the way for better understanding and diagnosis of auditory processing deficits.
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The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, a team of neuroscientists has discovered. Its findings indicate that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual because the brain has a mechanism that does not detect that the language has switched, allowing for a seamless transition in comprehending more than one language at once.
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Mismatch negativity (MMN) is a well-documented brain signal that appears in the electroencephalogram (EEG) when the auditory system detects an unexpected sound. More recently, the MMN (which doesn’t require the listener’s active participation) has been used to determine if different hearing aid features support or augment a listener’s tracking of changing speech sounds from a single voice out of many. This study shows that the Signia Augmented Xperience (AX) platform and its Augmented Focus (AF) system—which splits the incoming sound into two separate signal streams—increases the contrast between sounds in a “cocktail party”-type setting and enhances listeners’ tracking of changing phonemes. Further, the results suggest the behavioral advantages are probably bottom-up in nature, meaning that AF also likely reduces the effort/fatigue experienced by the wearer when trying to communicate in noisy environments.
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Research into the association between COVID-19 and hearing-related symptoms is still in the early phases. Fortunately, our knowledge of the audiovestibular system continues to grow alongside with our understanding of COVID-19. Authors Matthew Kelley, AuD, and Sugata Bhattacharjee, AuD, provide a brief review of research on Covid-19 and its impact on the ear.
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Researchers says that the results support the notion that musical and linguistic brain functions are closely linked in the developing brain.
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The results collectively reveal how the brain continues responding to music, even when none is playing, and provide new insights into how human sensory predictions work. An article detailing the research appears on the Trinity College Dublin website.
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Every high-school physics student learns that sound and light travel at very different speeds. If the brain did not account for this difference, it would be much harder for us to tell where sounds came from, and how they are related to what we see.
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The results, published in “Scientific Reports,” confirm that newborn neural encoding of voice pitch is comparable to the adults’ abilities after three years of being exposed to language.
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Cochlear implants enable people with severe hearing loss to hear again. An audiologist adjusts the cochlear implants based on the user’s input, but this is not always easy.
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With the offshore wind industry expanding in the United States and elsewhere, a new study raises questions about how the noise from impact pile driving to install turbine supports can affect feeding behaviors of longfin squid, a commercially and ecologically important cephalopod.
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One of the most amazing abilities of the human brain is its capacity for change. Based on the findings of authors Hannah Glick and Anu Sharma, it appears that untreated hearing loss (even mild sensorineural hearing loss) is associated with neural re-organization and cognitive deficits.
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Different languages describe motion differently, according to distinct lexical rules. And though we may not consciously notice those rules, we follow them—and Georgia State researchers have found they affect how our brains perceive and process descriptions of physical movement.
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In the eNeuro study, the scientists’ primary goal was to uncover how the brain computes possibilities as conveyed by so-called “modal” words such as “may” or “might”—as in, “There is a monster under my bed” as opposed to, “There might be a monster under my bed.”
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