Pauline Ashley Prize 2007
6 October 2006
The Pauline Ashley Prize 2007 has been awarded to Sam Irving, a young researcher at the MRC Institute for Hearing Research in Nottingham, who is looking for the region of the brain that helps us to hear someone in a noisy place, such as a party or bar, and is responsible for 'training' the brain to hear better in these situations.
Most people with a hearing impairment have trouble picking out what someone is saying when they’re in a noisy room. Parties or bars are some of the worst places because the level of background noise is high, and so scientists call this the 'cocktail party effect'.
Our ability to detect a particular sound in the middle of lots of noise relies on the fact that we have two ears, and each detects an individual sound at a slightly different time (a sound coming from the left will reach the left ear slightly faster than it reaches the right ear). But, if you have some form of hearing problem in at least one ear, this ability is disrupted and the brain struggles to tell one sound from another.
Irving is trying to locate the place in the brain which is channeling these feedback messages back to the ear. He explains that "we already have a likely candidate called the OCB, the Olivocochlear Bundle, which is a part of the brain that we know is a centre of feedback information being transmitted from the brain back to the ear. We’re now trying to work out if the OCB is responsible for spatial hearing."
The Pauline Ashley Prize will allow him to work with a team led by Professor Charles Liberman at the Eaton Peabody Lab at MIT/Harvard, leading experts on the OCB system.
