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New Brain-Computer Interface Will Replace Hearing Aids
- geophile 10y agoI have a concern not mentioned in the article. I have had tinnitus for 30 years. I have not heard silence in that long. I hear a constant, high-pitched squeal, mostly on my right side. Between that, and diminished hearing on the same side (all due to the same events), I do very poorly hearing what people are saying in noisy environments, often cannot hear things quieter than the squeal, and cannot determine the direction a sound is coming from with any accuracy. (Also, due to the surgery, I can't use ear buds on one side, they just fall out. And if I put my head under water, I get so dizzy that I can't stand up or even sit up straight.) Every year that I get my ears checked out, I ask my doc if there is any progress on tinnitus. And every year the answer is no, there isn't. It is a very complex and poorly understood problem. My understanding is that researchers have determined that the neural activity associated with tinnitus is distributed through many parts of the brain. So I hear "brain-computer interface", especially relating to hearing, and I get very concerned about unintended consequences, because the circuitry is so poorly understood. While some of the benefits described in this article would be important for me, the possibility of triggering something even worse than my tinnitus would prevent me from being an early adopter.