The Audiologist Informer

A new UK study suggests that newborns start soaking up and tuning into the specifics of the world around them within hours, including the specific languages that they’ll speak.

How does the awake brain transform sensory input into a conscious experience? Research is shedding light on the response of the cerebral cortex to sounds in sleep versus wakefulness at a resolution of single neurons—and posing future possibilities for using sound for measuring consciousness, like when verifying if patients remain unconscious during a surgical procedure.

In a representative sample of US adults ages 20-59 years from NHANES data, higher blood concentrations of two organochlorine pesticides were positively correlated with the prevalence of low-frequency HL and with low- and speech-frequency PTA hearing threshold shifts after adjusting for potential confounders.

Perspectives on the important work of pediatric audiologist and researcher Susan Scollie of Canada's National Centre for Audiology are offered by Ryan McCreery, Dawna Lewis, Ann Marie Tharpe, and many of her colleagues.