Hearing Mojo

HearWear Ear Piece A group of collaborators in the UK is bringing high fashion to hearing aids with an upcoming exhibit at one of the world's leading museums for design, the Victoria & Albert (V&A) in London. Hearwear -- The Future of Hearing, which opens tomorrow, is the brainchild of the UK's largest organization for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, RNID (formerly the Royal National Institute for the Deaf). Co-sponsored by Blueprint, the design magazine, and by Wolff-Olins, one of the world's leading corporate and industrial design firms, the museum will feature contributions from Britain's leading fashion designers as well as international product design firms such as Ideo. The exhibit will feature concepts for hearing aids and other hearing-assistance products ranging from elegant jewelry such as a sleek necklace to designer glasses incorporating a hearing aid to bold in-the-ear aids masquerading as earrings. Other ideas for consumers, some borrowing technologies already incorporated into industrial products for noisy factories, include devices to boost your hearing in noisy bars and products which cancel noise, enabling you to control your environment by blocking out unwelcome sounds. With only about 30 percent of hard-of-hearing consumers in the UK taking advantage of hearing-assistance products -- comparable to the low market penetration in other developed countries -- the organizers of the exhibit see a tremendous market opportunity for good design to eliminate the stigma of using hearing aids and spark consumer demand as it has in other consumer-electronics markets. "We need a revolution in our thinking about hearing products," said John Low, Chief Executive of RNID. "Today there’s insufficient investment in the customer appeal of hearing aids. With the rise of new technologies, such as Bluetooth, there is a blurring of the edges around hearing products. Yet industry, particularly the consumer electronics industry, has been slow to recognise the vast potential of producing stylish, desirable hearing products that people want to use. Hearwear demonstrates huge possibilities. There has been an incredible revolution in the design of glasses, why not in hearing aids?"

Musical Ear I've written several times about the weird phenomenon of hearing noises and music in my head ever since my sudden hearing loss, and when I cited Dr. Neil Bauman's fascinating, in-depth book on auditory hallucinations, Phantom Voices, I made a rather strong statement about the lack of research that's been done on the subject by the traditional medical and scientific community. Now a long article in the Science section of today's New York Times, Neuron Network Goes Awry And Brain Becomes An Ipod, provides a fascinating look at the first research study that's been done on auditory hallucinations. (You will need to register and sign up for a free online NYT account to read the story). It seems a psychiatrist in Wales, Dr. Victor Aziz with St. Cadoc's Hospital, has collected 30 case histories over 15 years and drawn some scientific conclusions. Even though he became aware of the hallucinations in his psychiatric practice, people who have them are not crazy, Dr. Aziz says. MRI scans show musical auditory hallucinations don't occur in the auditory cortex where the brain first processes sound, but in a different region where the brain processes and converts simple sounds into the complex patterns of music. The hallucinations are distinctly different from and far more benign than the voices schizophrenics hear telling them to do things. They are more pronounced in people who live alone or experience less auditory stimulation in general than those who live in noisy environments. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people experience them more than hearing people, and the elderly experience them more than the young. They seem to be triggered not just by hearing loss but by other neurological events such as complications from epileptic seizures or Lyme disease.