Light Waves to Audio

Technocrat

Light Waves to Audio

zogger

Sun Nov 23 16:22:00 -0800 2008

Health+and+Medicine.

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Yes, it is a potential gadget, but a gadget that might make a world of difference for millions of deaf people. A researcher has found that the neurons at the base of inner ear auditory hairs react to infra red light, the stimulation makes sound in the brain, at least so far in animal studies. They hope to use this discovery to bring a more sophisticated and effective hearing aid to market.

Surgeons who used lasers to perform a surgical procedure in the ear discovered that they were able to stimulate the nerve cells there to send an electrical message back to the brain. ed.z.: Lazear.com, I can see it..hear it now.

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Thomas Lord

Sun Nov 23 18:24:17 -0800 2008
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I doubt they are the first to discover this.

We already know from fairly recent open sources that the spooks discovered that pulsed microwave lasers could be used to project sound stealthily into the heads of people, including subliminally. That, as well, is hypothesized to work by creating microscopic temperature gradients (on the scale of audible acoustic wavelengths) -- but probably in the skull bones rather than in soft-tissue cochlear "hairs". It would seem a logical assumption that, having found that, they experimented with other wavelengths as well.

The question then arises whether or not the infrared form can be projected remotely. I guess the microwave version is probably better since you don't need line of site, necessarily, other than in an environment of Faraday cages or some such.

I wish I had the means to start shoving FOIA down their throats, and hard. Forty years of experimentation with this stuff they've (I've no doubt) found all kinds of interesting tricks. Stands to reason, doesn't it, that they've accumulated plenty of outrageous abuses along the way.

Oh, yeah, helping deaf people. That's good. But, um....

-t

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Michael Smith

Mon Nov 24 00:23:52 -0800 2008
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I doubt they are the first to discover this

Years ago I read about somebody very early on (like Thomas Edison) doing this by bouncing a focused light source off a mirror, and mechanically linking the mirror to something like a sounding board.

The book or article I read predates the internet and I didn't find it with google. Maybe this could lead to a new angle on cochlear implants.

Incidently (and OT) I was at the beach a couple of weeks ago with my son and noticed a sign on a shop window. A child had lost the external part of their cochlear implant. They provided a picture because it is not the sort of thing a person would recognise. I hope somebody finds it. Those things are expensive.

A guy I used to work with told me his son has that kind of implant. He got too rough playing at school one day and damaged an internal connection. Now if his hearing stops working his parents have to push in a particular place on his head to reseat the connection.

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pyro9

Fri Nov 28 22:24:57 -0800 2008
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Maybe this could lead to a new angle on cochlear implants.

There's a lot of potential there. The current implants are severely limited in their frequency resolution. The electrodes can only be so fine and because they aren't directly connected to the neurons, they stimulate fairly wide areas.
Because the electrode placement is extremely invasive, any residual hearing is destroyed by the procedure.

Focused IR has a lot of promise to provide more fine grained stimulation (and so more natural hearing) with a lot less potential for degradation over time.
It would probably still destroy residual hearing though.

On a side note, I'm surprised that the various patents on MP3 haven't been struck down based on patents and publications for cochlear implants. The processing that happens in the external unit strongly resembles MP3 compression in order to deal with the few frequency bands available to the user (a maximum of 24 currently).