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A quick reminder that we will be joined by Professor Jan Schnupp, Professor of Neuroscience at the City University of Hong Kong this
Thursday 28th April at 2.00 pm (UK time). Please see detailed below: “How experiments in animals can point to better strategies for cochlear implants” Abstract:
Cochlear Implants (CIs) have become a standard treatment for patients with severe hearing sensorineural loss. The most common cause of such hearing loss
is loss of the inner ears' sensitive "hair cell" receptors which convert sound wave vibrations into neural activity. CIs use sound processor devices to convert incoming sounds into patterns of electrical pulses that are delivered directly to the auditory nerve,
bypassing the damaged or missing hair cells. In doing so they often restore enough of a sense of hearing to allow people to understand speech in quiet, but the sense of hearing afforded by these devices is nevertheless very poor compared to healthy, natural
hearing. One particular weakness is the poor ability of CI users to localize sounds in space, and researchers had previously speculated that this may be due to abnormal development of the auditory pathway during the period of deafness that precedes cochlear
implantation, which may damage the normal auditory system's remarkable ability to detect minuscule differences in the arrival time of sounds between the two ears. But researching binaural cue development in deaf patients faces many limitations, which is why
our team has turned to animal experiments using deafened rats. Over the past 6 years we have made a string of discoveries, which I will review in this talk. We were able to show that deafness per se does not damage the potential for exquisite interaural time
difference sensitivity, that paying attention to precise electric pulse timing in the CIs is key to good binaural hearing, but also that certain echo suppression mechanisms in the brain do seem to be shaped by experience. Our experiments are generating a wealth
of data which can guide the development of better prosthetic auditory devices for deaf patients in the future. Biography:
Jan Schnupp graduated from University College London with a Bachelor in Genetics in 1990 and obtained a doctorate in Neurophysiology from the University
of Oxford in 1996 and a bachelor in mathematical sciences from the Open University in 2006. He was a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and a visiting research fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before joining the faculty of the
University of Oxford in 2002, where he was promoted to Professor in 2010. In 2016, Jan joined the faculty of City University of Hong Kong. If you would like to join this seminar, please use the link below: Microsoft Teams meeting – Professor Jan Schnupp Join on your computer or mobile app Click
here to join the meeting We look forward to seeing you there. Best wishes, Joe 2.00 pm / 14:00 (GMT/Greenwich Mean Time)
3.00 pm / 15:00 (CET/Central European Time)
6.00 am / 06:00 (USA Pacific)
8.00 am / 08:00 (USA Central)
9.00 am / 09:00 (USA Eastern)
9.00 pm / 21:00 (CST/China Standard Time) Dr Joseph Sollini Auditory Circuits Lab Hearing Sciences Mental Health and Clinical Neuroscience, School of Medicine The University of Nottingham W:
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/hearingsciences/people/joseph.sollini W:
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