While you’re humming along to the Talking Heads, I’d like to consider another group who can listen to the Talking Heads without really hearing them. For a person with a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that restores hearing in someone who is profoundly deaf, listening to music isn’t the rich, sensory experience that a [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Wandering through what seems like miles of presentations, posters, and excited scientists at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting, I can’t help but overhear a lot. Conversations about everything from the ventral medial prefrontal cortex to fMRI; social rewards to serotonin. There is something about the buzzing hum of thousands of voices and [...]

Whales can boom their songs across thousands of kilometers of ocean, and elephants’ low-frequency calls can be heard by other pachyderms several kilometers away. But when body size is taken into consideration, these mammoth mammals produce but a relative whisper compared with other animals—especially one odd arthropod. The water boatman (Micronecta scholtzi), a 2.3-millimeter-long insect, [...]

Not only can squids and octopuses sense sound, but as it turns out, these and other so-called cephalopods might be harmed by growing noise pollution in our oceans—from sources such as offshore drilling, ship motors, sonar use and pile driving. "We know that noise pollution in the oceans has a significant impact on dolphins and [...]

Loud, persistent ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, can be vexing for its millions of sufferers. This perceived noise can be symptomatic of many different ills—from earwax to aging—but the most common cause is from noise-induced hearing loss, such as extended exposure to construction or loud music, and treating many of its underlying neural [...]

In our introductory post, we wrote “let’s face it. We’re visual beings.” Here’s proof: