Auditory physiology
- Cochlear mechanics
- Outer hair cells
- Impact of auditory physiology research on deaf education
- Current research
- Abstracts
- Other links
- Citations
Cochlear mechanics
The inner ear is one of nature's more remarkable transduction devices. In particular, the snail-shaped cochlea serves to transduce sounds into electrical signals that are ultimately encoded by the brain.Stephen Neely was one of the first people to set up a website on cochlear mechanics.
The lay person would be interested in this review aimed at parents of deaf children, professionals working with deaf children and deaf people by W. E. Brownell: How the ear works - Nature's solutions for listening. The Volta Review, Volume 99, number 5, pages 9-28 (1999).
Take a promenade round the cochlea which is an exciting educational tool developed by Remy Pujol of Univerisité de Montepellier, France and Daniel Bertrand of Université de Genève, Switzerland.
A very colourful website on cochlear mechanics has been created by Fabio Mammano.
Visit a digital warehouse of auditory models and data at Boston University.
Outer hair cells
Since the dramatic discovery of outer hair cell (OHC) electromotility by Brownell and colleagues in 1985, a growing body of evidence suggests that the OHC is responsible for the remarkable frequency selectivity and sensitivity of mammalian hearing.This movie shows why the OHC is one of the more unusual cells found in biology. One may claim that no other cell in biology elongates and shortens in response to stimuli at high frequencies.
A colleague, John Oghalai at Baylor College of Medicine wrote about Hearing and Hair Cells for Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers (H.E.A.R.).
The Quivering Bundles that Let Us Hear is an excellent review of ground-breaking research on the stereocilia of auditory hair cells.
Impact of auditory physiology research on deaf education
The dramatic impact of research in auditory physiology, especially the importance of early identification of deafness leading to early intervention strategies in capitalizing on the neuro-plasticity of the developing auditory system, can be seen from these remarkable videos, "Dreams spoken Here" and "Speaking for myself" which can be ordered free from the Oral Deaf Education website.The Mary Hare Grammar School for the Deaf, Newbury, England and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, Washington, DC, to name but a few, have been at the forefront of oral deaf education.
Early education of the deaf Adler, Liebman, Raphael, Ratnanather and Steyger. (Science v. 279 n.5357, p. 1611).
If you find that books on raising a deaf child are expensive, you will like Beyond these Walls of Silence written by a Sri Lankan mother of a deaf adult. (You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file).
Current research
Dancing outer hair cells of the inner ear.The hydrodynamics of the extracisternal space of the cochlear outer hair cell.
Abstracts
An analysis of the hydraulic conductivity of the extracisternal space of the cochlear outer hair cell.Hypotonic swelling of salicylate treated cochlear outer hair cells.
The ratio of elastic moduli of the cochlear outer hair cell measured from osmotic experiments.
Measurements and a model of outer hair cell hydraulic conductivity.
Three of a handful of hearing impaired people doing
research in auditory physiology: Tilak Ratnanather (left), Robert Raphael
(center) and Peter Steyger (right). Catherine Harter, a graduate student
in cochlear physiology at the Université de Montpellier who is also
hearing impaired, took this photo at a reception at the 21st meeting of
the Association of Research of Otolaryngology at the Tradewinds Hotel,
St. Petersburg Beach, FL., February 1998.
Other links
Yale Ear Lab (Santos-Sacchi).Jonathan Ashmore's Cochlear Physiology Laboratory, University College London.
Steyger Lab (Oregon Health Science University)
University of Texas at Dallas Speech Processing Laboratory and Cochlear Implant Laboratory. The latter has a superb online tutorial on cochlear implants.
Cochlear Fluids Lab, Washington University at St Louis..
Hair Cell Mircomechanics, MIT.
Download Auditory Tour software
Association for Research in Otolaryngology.
Computational fluid dynamics of speech generation
Audiology Forum: Video Otoscopy
Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the cochlea
Citations
This web page has been cited by two recent reviews:"How well do we understand the cochlea?", R.Nobili, F.Mammano and J.F.Ashmore, published in Trends in Neurosciences (TINS) - N.21, April 1998, pp. 159 -167.
"Sensory systems Web alert", J. F. Burke and P. J. Benson, published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology Vol 8, No 4., August 1998, pp. 441-442.