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Psychology Today
Sept 30, 2016
by Michelle Carr

It’s often thought that when one sensory modality is weakened, the other senses become more attuned to compensate. For example, someone with significant hearing loss may then be more visually sensitive. One recent study set out to investigate whether this sort of compensation might also occur during dreams. Do individuals with hearing loss experience more visual dreams? And what about their hearing, do they struggle with comprehension or confusion even in sleep?

In the past, researchers have compared the dream content of hearing loss vs. hearing individuals with conflicting results. For example, Mendelson, Siger, and Solomon (1960) conducted interviews on dreams with participants with congenital deafness, hearing loss acquired before five years, and hearing loss acquired later. They found that several facets of dream experience were amplified in the congenital hearing loss group, including: dream recall frequency, color, vividness and spatial depth.

Read more  . . . Dreams

 

Study shows architecture of audition likely based on innate factors

Harvard Gazette
By Peter Reuell, Harvard Staff Writer
July 18, 2016

The neural architecture in the auditory cortex — the part of the brain that processes sound — is virtually identical in profoundly deaf and hearing people, a new study has found.

The study raises a host of new questions about the role of experience in processing sensory information, and could point the way toward potential new avenues for intervention in deafness. The study is described in a June 18 paper published in Scientific Reports.

The paper was written by Ella Striem-Amit, a postdoctoral researcher in Alfonso Caramazza’s Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Harvard, Mario Belledonne from Harvard, Jorge Almeida from the University of Coimbra, and Quanjing Chen, Yuxing Fang, Zaizhu Han, and Yanchao Bi from Beijing Normal University.

Read more  . . . auditory cortex

 

 

SCIENCE
By Jyoti Madhusoodanan

Peter Hauser Photo Credit: M. Benjamin
Peter Hauser Photo Credit: M. Benjamin

It’s a team sport, but indoor polo doesn’t take much talking—which helped make it an instant fit for Peter Hauser. During his freshman year of college, a few horse hours were a weekly routine: polo three times a week, together with training ponies or coaching local students in the sport. But Hauser had a stronger motivation than his love of the game: The horses didn’t expect him to hear them.

At the age of 5, a bout of spinal meningitis left Hauser completely deaf. While in middle school, he attempted to use cochlear implants—considered an experimental treatment at the time—but the prosthetics proved ineffective. The procedures and monitoring nonetheless had an upside: They provided his earliest experiences working with researchers, which helped him become interested in pursuing science himself.

Hauser had a longstanding interest in human psychology. As a deaf student, however, he didn’t think he could work with people as research subjects, so he chose to major in animal sciences instead. But when his advanced courses proved challenging, he began taking evening sign language classes at a community college so that he could use an interpreter to keep up—he had relied on lip-reading up to that point—and the decision was life-changing.

Read Article  . . . Tuning in to deaf needs