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It's also hard to figure out just how the animal's hearing is improving (you can't simply ask) This seems relatively easy, right? Play a sound at a given
by JohnBooty 5y ago
It's also hard to figure out just how the
animal's hearing is improving (you can't simply ask)
This seems relatively easy, right? Play a sound at a given frequency, associate it with a food reward. Like Pavlov's dog, but vary the frequency of the bell.
Oversimplification obviously, and "easy" is extreme relative to all the other hard parts involved but that part seems very doable
- ddingus 5y agoWell, there's more to it than binary to text you. I agree with you, in that the signaling perception is probably easy. However, let's say that that frequency is coupled with several others, making for noise for poor discrimination. For that kind of thing, we're going to need real people who can communicate in detail.
- gumby 5y agoYeah, fitting and tuning a hearing aid is quite complicated, and there are intelligent people at both sides of the process.
- gumby 5y agoOne sobering lesson from my time working in the life sciences is that everything is insanely complex and once you've isolated everything in your problem space into a small, relatively isolated set, you still end up with an insanely complex space. Essentially it's fractally complex.
- fierro 5y agolife is "fractally" complex. Sometimes I feel computing is also fractally complex.
- crackedbassoon 5y agoExcept it is actually quite easy to measure hearing thresholds in nonhumans as well as human babies via auditory brain responses (ABRs).
- lamename 5y agoYou are right, but so is the grandparent. A noise, click, or tone-based ABR is very basic in terms of measuring restoration of natural hearing. There are issues of rich spectrotempral aspects of speech, music, and natural sounds that (ideally) would be accounted for. Along with amplification and gain control, to which Outer Hair Cells are a major contributor in the cochlea. There are various ways to measure these thing in animals and humans physiologically (ABRs, otoacoustic emissions, invasive and noninvasive electrophysiology), and with careful psychophysical experiments. None are perfect or comprehensive. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses. But it is indeed more complex than just testing a basic audibility threshold. The same issues come up with audigorams for hearing aid calibration and hearing in noise.
- Traubenfuchs 5y agoI guess you can easily damage a rats/monkeys hearing consistently (may we find peace for our sins) and I guess you can easily strap those animals into an MRI or strap an EEG measuring device onto one. Seems simpler than training a significant amount of them!
- pygy_ 5y agoMore simply, play a loud sound in a narrow band and check if there's a startle response.
- pyinstallwoes 5y agoYou may enjoy: https://youtu.be/tONF9OSUOSw https://youtu.be/tONF9OSUOSw “How Loud Can Sound Physically Get?” - amazing breakdown of the subjective nature of loudness.
- bsder 5y agoThe brain also needs time to "rewire" once it starts accepting more and better input. "Rotating your eyeball" as a treatment for macular degeneration is a good example. Your brain needs a week or so to "reorient" even though the physical procedure is done in a couple hours.
- jacquesm 5y agoExperimental design in medical trials on animals is extremely complex.