Sensory perception and plasticity

I found these two articles over at earplugs’s blog.

This one from Wired contains this amazing paragraph:

More than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles that severely distorted their vision: The lenses turned the world upside down. After several weeks, subjects adjusted — their vision was still tweaked, but their brains were processing the images so they’d appear normal. In fact, when people took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything seemed to move and distort in the opposite way.

Yeah, that sums up what I’m hearing!  It isn’t upside down of course, but the feeling over distortion and overwhelming-ness sounds about right.  It also helps explain why my hearing aid, which was normal for 15 years, sounds distorted now when I try to switch back.  It’s as unbelievable to me that what I’m hearing will sound ‘normal’ as that upside down vision could become normal.

The rest of that article, and this one talk about equally amazing things like being able to see with your tongue.

One response to “Sensory perception and plasticity”

  1. Mog

    I suppose what we hear through our hearing aids isn’t normal. My Phonak’s gave more distortion than the current Siemen’s ones, but it’s definitely not normal hearing people would hear.

    The sounds in your head must be pretty disconcerting, I hope they are tolerable and start to become more normal soon

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Photo of Sara Looking out a Window
I'm a 30 year old girl originally from upstate NY. I work full time as an engineer and try to pack as many hobbies into the other 14 hours of my day as I can. I lost my hearing at age 14 and have been using hearing aids since then. In April 2009 I received my first cochlear implant. That went really well so in December 2009 I got the second. The CIs are what prompted me to start writing publicly - but I try to cover other things as well.

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