hearing
Snapshots of Life: The Biological Basis of Hearing
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: Peter Barr-Gillespie and Kateri Spinelli, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland
Did you know that chickens have ears? Well, here’s the evidence—you’re looking at a micrograph of sensory hair cells that make up the inner ear of Gallus gallus domesticus, otherwise known as the domestic chicken. Protruding from each hair cell is a tall bundle of stiff appendages, called stereocilia, that capture vibrations and enable the chicken to hear everything from grain being poured into a feeder to the footsteps of a wily fox. The flatter area is occupied by supporting cells, which have recently been shown to have the capacity to regenerate damaged or destroyed hair cells.
Peter Barr-Gillespie and Kateri Spinelli of Oregon Health & Science University, Portland used a scanning electron microscope to capture this image—one of the winners of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s 2014 BioArt competition—while studying how these cells convert sound waves into brain waves. It is generally known that sound waves cause the stereocilia on each hair cell to oscillate in concert. These vibrating stereocilia trigger electrical changes in the hair cells, which then send signals to the brain. Barr-Gillespie’s group focuses on the actual molecules that build the stereocilia and translate the vibrations into brain signals.
Creative Minds: A Baby’s Eye View of Language Development
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
If you are a fan of wildlife shows, you’ve probably seen those tiny video cameras rigged to animals in the wild that provide a sneak peek into their secret domains. But not all research cams are mounted on creatures with fur, feathers, or fins. One of NIH’s 2014 Early Independence Award winners has developed a baby-friendly, head-mounted camera system (shown above) that captures the world from an infant’s perspective and explores one of our most human, but still imperfectly understood, traits: language.
Elika Bergelson
Credit: Zachary T. Kern
Elika Bergelson, a young researcher at the University of Rochester in New York, wants to know exactly how and when infants acquire the ability to understand spoken words. Using innovative camera gear and other investigative tools, she hopes to refine current thinking about the natural timeline for language acquisition. Bergelson also hopes her work will pay off in a firmer theoretical foundation to help clinicians assess children with poor verbal skills or with neurodevelopmental conditions that impair information processing, such as autism spectrum disorders.
Vision Loss Boosts Auditory Perception
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: A neuron (red) in the auditory cortex of a mouse brain receives input from axons projecting from the thalamus (green). Also shown are the nuclei (blue) of other cells.
Credit: Emily Petrus, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Many people with vision loss—including such gifted musicians as the late Doc Watson (my favorite guitar picker), Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli, and the Blind Boys of Alabama—are thought to have supersensitive hearing. They are often much better at discriminating pitch, locating the origin of sounds, and hearing softer tones than people who can see. Now, a new animal study suggests that even a relatively brief period of simulated blindness may have the power to enhance hearing among those with normal vision.
In the study, NIH-funded researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found that when they kept adult mice in complete darkness for one week, the animals’ ability to hear significantly improved [1]. What’s more, when they examined the animals’ brains, the researchers detected changes in the connections among neurons in the part of the brain where sound is processed, the auditory cortex.
A White Halloween Costume That’s Not a Ghost
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Dr. Jay Rubinstein and his mini-me, Landon Browne
Credit: Courtesy of Mary Guiden, Seattle Children’s Hospital
What costume to wear for Halloween? For many kids, it’s a difficult choice, but not so for 7-year-old Landon Browne. This year, he’s not going as a zombie or an action hero—he’s going as an NIH-funded researcher!
Landon, who was born almost completely deaf, has decided to dress up as his real-life superhero: Jay Rubinstein, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-scientist at Seattle Children’s Hospital who performed the surgeries that have enabled the boy to hear.
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