My doctor let out a chuckle and stuck a tongue depressor in my mouth. Pondering the plausibility of my immune system’s use of thought, reason and planning, I must have left my mouth wide open in awe. "Doc, you don’t understand - this sore throat is more than just an inconvenience. Having only one imperceptible symptom, I would need to expound further. I swallowed my pride and trudged toward a ridiculous meeting where I would have to explain all of my "symptoms". Two hours later, with a belly full of every snake oil on the market, I grudgingly bit the bullet and made an appointment. I sought every powder, pill, paste or potion that might offer some relief. I would do anything to skip being sick this year.Īfter waking up with the "itchy, scratchy, sore throat", I turned my entire house upside down. I had bought new skis, scoped out some great winter trails and printed out directions for how to make an igloo. This is the cold that I was trying to avoid this year. This horrendous condition has ruined every single winter season for the better part of the last decade. I catch a cold, or the crud as I call it, in the late fall and it keeps me out of commission until at least the beginning of February. It’s during this period of time that I seem to get very sick, every single year. Perhaps some people don’t take a sore throat very seriously, but I do - at least from October to December. I had what is (probably) known amongst health care professionals as an "itchy, scratchy, sore throat." Terrifying, I know. In the old days she would have asked, "Which class is your test in?" and laughed, before sending me off to school. My own mother wouldn’t have feared for my health. I wasn’t bleeding or broken, and I certainly wasn’t in any real pain. These BBSRC-funded studies of a fundamental biological process may bring exciting developments in helping people with hearing and other disabilities.Bear with me while I tell you the tale of how I found out about a serious boater’s health hazard… Professor Nigel Brown, BBSRC Director of Science and Technology, said: "This research is revealing how our senses work and how the brain interprets information from the ears. The animals are trained to respond to different sounds and the implants enable the team to observe the auditory neurons as the ferret responds to different sounds. The Oxford team's current project is fitting trained ferrets with harmless auditory implants. "If we can understand how the auditory cortex has evolved to do this we may be able to apply the knowledge to develop hearing aids that can blot out background noise and speech recognition systems that can handle different accents." We are now investigating how they distinguish between pitch, spatial location and timbre. In the auditory cortex the neurons seem to overwhelmingly react to several of the different properties of sound. Dr Schnupp explains: "In the closely related visual cortex there are different neurons for processing colour, form and motion. When the researchers look at how the auditory cortex responds to changes in pitch, timbre and frequency they saw that most neurons reacted to each change. If you could borrow someone else's ears you would have real difficulty in locating the source of sounds, at least until your brain had relearned how to do it."ĭr Schnupp has also found that the auditory cortex does not have neurons sensitive to different aspects of sound. Each person's auditory cortex in their brain is adapted to way their ears deliver sound to them and their experience of the world. These are also the patterns most commonly found in both nature and musical compositions.ĭr Schnupp, a research leader at the University of Oxford Auditory Neuroscience Group, said: "Our research to model speech sounds in the lab has shown that auditory neurons in the brain are adaptable and we learn how to locate and identify sounds. Dr Schnupp's team have found that our brains are adapted to the former the neurons in the auditory cortex appear to anticipate and respond best to gradual changes in the soundscape. For example, subtle and gradual changes are statistically more regular than large and sudden changes. The random shifts in sounds are underpinned with a statistical regularity. In the world loudness and pitch are constantly changing. The research team at the University of Oxford, led by Dr Jan Schnupp, have studied the auditory cortex of the brain and discovered that its responses are determined not merely by acoustical properties, like frequency and pitch, but by statistical properties of the sound-scape. The research could help to develop more sophisticated hearing aids and more effective speech recognition systems.
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