download onto your smartphone of also check out our website e.w. dot com and also follow us on social media we're on instagram and on twitter and i have a list as d.w. news i'm got offers for me the news team. when you hear me now i guess we don't need you in how the last 2 years german chancellor when you bring a new angle our mascot and you've never heard have been surprised to self what is possible who is medical really what moves her and want. to talk to people who followed her along the way myra's and critics might join us from apple's last stop .

yes yes i'm thinking of all those millions of people down there. many of our interest for our hearing loss. here you us is a problem and the science can provide solutions. and here i am up here they don't know i exist but i'm working in a sense for. we are thinking always about care and the work we are doing alternately help some of these people. if our work can contribute to solving that problem and that to me personally it's extremely important to. our sense of hearing any pulls us to experience the world around us through sound it also allows us to see. go out and focus on

a particular sound even amid the cacophony of every day noise. sometimes we choose to shout out that every day noise. and sometimes we hear it whether we want to or not. our ears are the gateway to an extraordinary sense the sense of hearing. before they began building cities humans were closely connected to their natural surroundings our sense of hearing is like a radar that helps us explore our environment even when our bodies are at rest this radar picks up even the slightest sounds and localizes the direction they're coming from. humans process information with their ears better and much faster than they

do with their eyes. the ability to localize where each sound comes from plays an especially important role for people who are visually impaired and only able marcel's to look on me and my sense of hearing is what allows me to explore my surroundings because it keeps me safe and helps me connect with people who really are saluki them up will being able to hear is wonderful and sometimes quite emotional clear especially when i hear certain sounds or listen to music or a boy you're in music when i'm miserable renewal pro or ball since i can't see that i experience everything that others experience with their eyes 3 white years or so tall so when you move to the moon. his sense of hearing plays a crucial role in helping d.j. russia navigate everyday life even in paris a loud and bustling city his ears let him scope his. surroundings peter rios he

said to measure execute a match for meticulous it's almost magical. my sense of hearing ensures that i'm safe on the streets of soundwave spread in a predictable pattern and can tell me for example if there is an obstacle to my right in which a car to my left or a person is coming up behind my hearing is an excellent tool that affords me autonomy it's like a miracle worker being able to hear lets me live my life if you know. the ability to identify the location or origin of any detected sound gives people who are visually impaired cues that help them orient themselves and avoid obstacles . i can hear water behind me it sounds like it's coming out of a tap someone is right behind me behind my right shoulder. i

feel like there's a wall or a building nearby but some more. god is something else closer by to my right i don't want is all false there mused i can hear children playing clapping their hands there behind me. visitors there are grown ups here too and from a woman to my right with a child. going so no other woman is upset mission orders us us children. look over there's something odd happening above me like a storm brewing grad laura sounds directly above me does reach me as well. as i don't know what that is. masochist will both ammonia. has detected something that isn't even emitting sound the sound operator's boom microphone directly above him and untrained ear would never have noticed it.

at a relatively short distances we can detect the direction a sound is coming from with an accuracy of about 2 degrees to do that our brain calculates the difference in time it takes the sound to reach each ear and factors in fluctuations in volume and frequency caused by the shapes of our head and outer ear the pinna or oracle. sound waves enter the outer ear and travel through a narrow passageway the auditory can now this leads to the ear drum. hear the sound waves are picked up as vibrations and passed on to 3 tiny bones in the middle ear the 1st is the hammer which carries the vibrations on to the and us which in turn passes them to the stirrup. together these 3 ossicles convert the vibrations from the ear drum into amplified pressure waves that they pass forward to the inner ear or coakley or this is the spiral shaped

cavity in the bony labyrinth. the motion of the bones causes the fluid and membrane inside the coakley are to move along the entire length of its spiral shape. depending on the frequency and volume of the incoming sound this causes the hair cells in certain areas of the coakley out to bend. the bent terror cells then generate a nerve impulse the stimuli are transmitted to the brain and interpreted as sound. researchers are learning more and more about how we hear. about the death of the trance or shot i've been researching how hearing works for about 20 years i wish and every single day i'm still astonished by how little we know even if your

business one of the fun toss and by how fantastic what we do know is our ears are highly sophisticated in terms of sensitivity and temporal position in the conclusion. on times in the fun side you really don't encounter that anywhere else in our nervous system the office of students and then the topic of of my shoulders brings me to the major leagues and actors and researchers at a number of institutes in getting in are focusing on various aspects of hearing me in this many different relating with medical some of the for sponsors where their findings are used to help develop new medical applications and charities here on campus certainly for the field where you basically check their sensitivity. but so far research has not found a way to make music fully accessible to people with hearing impairments even though

they can learn to understand speech. at the inner ear lab at the university medical center in gutting and researchers are trying out a new approach they're working on an implant that digitally converts sound into light. and transmits the impulses directly into the coils of the cochlear this should allow for a high quality perception of language sounds and even music. by botanists why do you. there are 2 conditions for being able to hear with light 1st we need to be able to install light switches and these nerve cells in the kettle and then we have to insert a chain of light sources into the coakley or to stimulate these light sensitive nerve cells or from just a 1000000. a person who is profoundly deaf or a severely hard of hearing can already use a coakley or implant or c.i. then wires directly stimulate the auditory nerve with electrical impulses. these

signals generated by the implant are sent by way of the auditory nerve to the brain which recognizes the signals as sound. these days fitting a c.i. is a straightforward procedure how well they work varies from person to person is pushed up any cuts money explains why is. unfair i don't i became hard of hearing when i was about 3 years old or and of eventually hearing aids 100 for this there anymore when i was pretty much deaf at least in one ear and hope so i decided to get an implant even though i never wanted one before and often she'd know police would have. stephanie cuts man uses a hearing aid in one ear and a coakley or implant in the other deacons and we could is there a difference. as it were to see it so bush just us moral it really

does is amplify the harry ability i still have left on this side any sound i hear is artificially generated technician i would never have imagined our brains could mesh what we hear in each together so well i can't tell the difference. what i hear sounds completely normal it's incredible the. unexpected a computer generated until sounds of king and the place you're on i'm quite impressed with. the chicago. it's with us too. this is how a ko clear implant sounds the user can recognise speech quite well picking up music works last well. this is how music sounds as a select to chicago but have kind of thought points of tar these days a cochlear implant can deliver 8 to 10 channel should the implant might in fact

offer 20 to 24 channels it's funny but only $8.00 to $10.00 are practical for the user not paying that limits the range of creek wincey resolution available and it's like playing piano with your for job club here. as a statement see you in for picture the coakley like a spiral staircase along spiral staircase with 2000 steps and one of us who can view the need usually we can tell the steps apart but the coke clear implant stimulates the nerve cells in a way that activates an entire flight of steps at once as much as you're going to trip up so it's the stimuli generated extend so far into the coakley as fluids snicko it would be akin to trying to play the piano with your face or your entire for a few to toss you had many keys at once life is easier to spatially confinement is bad brings us closer to a more natural hearing experience the true children in our stare example it's like skipping fewer steps but there's a finer pitch resolution. i mean you think illustrates the difference

this is how you hands a bastion bass sounds with an 8 channel c.i. i barely more than a strange with them i. using light signals to stimulate the inner ear improves intelligibility and allows listeners to enjoy the music in many more facets i am. but before nerve cells can respond to light impulses they have to be genetically altered to be light sensitive. opto genetics is a relatively new field of research its approach to controlling neurons with light

is the basis for l.-e. d. based coakley or implants. high resolution imaging renders the auditory hair cells and their sign abscissa visible. these hair cells are critical. they collect sound information and relay it to the brain through the auditory nerve. how many we have greatly determines how well we hear. these affair going to be encouraging and it's very why we develop the coloration technique here in getting and that is now used all over the world use it allows us to count sign up says and the results are astounding you know there are 80 year olds who have just one sign ups left printer harris out soon for when we lose auditory hair cells will 1st notice a decline in understanding a speech should 1st read only later well we noticed poor performance and

a hearing test at some point in our hair cells start to deteriorate across the entire frequency range of the coakley that's what we call a dead region where sound is no longer being encoded thought that god can china could get. the function of hair cells is to convert the mechanical waves they pick up into nerve signals. if only a patchwork of hair cells remain our hearing becomes limited. there are some 20000 hair cells in the inner ear. but only $3600.00 of them are responsible for converting and transmitting most of the signals received they're the ones doing the heavy lifting. but persistent noise or noise that is too loud can damage the hair cells beyond repair this damage is often irreversible. once a hair cell loses its functionality it can't be reactivated.

3600 hair cells is a finite number. if they stop working our inner ear looses the ability to hear. this can happen as a result of acoustic trauma or of gradual hearing loss which affects a growing number of people. could restoring the sign absence between hair cells and nerve cells restore someone's sense of hearing. this is what professor charles mccann a researchers at the university of southern california. i have a feeling that hearing loss is associated with all the people i'll call the grandfather saying you know speak up ways i can't hear you there may be

a lack of realization that this is a process that can be very young age and especially if you're being exposed to very loud sounds for example devices placed in your play music that is too loud. and there's got damage the damage accumulates over time. hearing loss is very gradual it isn't like you wake up the day after a big music concert where the music was extremely loud you see death. it is insidious it is taking place. very slowly and in perceptively if you will it's a little bit like protecting yourself from the sun you know you have to wear sunscreen but if you don't wear it a particular day you don't get skin cancer the next week it's something that slow and insidious according to the world health organization over 450000000 people worldwide suffer disabling hearing loss they can no longer hear

a clock ticking the figure includes 34000000 children and young people a solution to the problem is urgent. charles mckenna and his colleagues are looking for a method to reverse hearing loss caused by nonfunctioning hair so it's. almost all adults will experience age related hearing loss the older they get the harder it becomes to detect higher frequencies. young people on the other hand have no problem with that sound. good anyway it's a ring tone where you can hear it and i hear it so. you're better but if i. was 10 or so. the. gradual loss of hearing often goes undiagnosed for some time

even though it affects a person's everyday life and their social life. well i can think about for example my own father who passed the age of about 60 s. started to have noticeable hearing loss he had to use a hearing aid. a and. i was really struck by the way he began to feel isolated even within our own family because of difficulties in communication and he started to complain that people don't speak up or in a restaurant why are people talking so loud it can talk to my mom i also saw the program and how it gets worse and worse the hearing ability declines and the impact therefore grows on on the person. it's easy to distinguish the effects of hearing loss in a noisy environment. when we converse our brains filter speech out of the

surrounding sounds to understand speech the brain needs to detect the higher frequencies that set speech apart from other sounds for young people and people whose hearing is fully intact this is easy. but older people start to lose the ability to hear high pitched sounds and struggle to filter speech out of background noise. all they can hear is a muffled hum conversing becomes increasingly challenging they need people to speak up. children have no problems filtering speech out of a wall of sound. this is roughly how conversation sounds to someone with age related hearing loss.

and this is how it sounds to a child or teenager yes. there was a lot of putting the opportunity out there i don't want to get out of. egypt all the. young people here are wider frequency range children in particular are good at filtering speech out of ambient noise the. alarmed by the prospect of hearing loss to students in miami florida have decided to do what they could to prevent it. i been music my entire life i did choir and then i was the vocalist for the jazz band at my high school i i realize since i was young 14 that it could affect me at such a young age and i really had no idea and i was a little worried too as a musician. kelly call hain and ben manley were still at school when they joined

a nonprofit organization that raises awareness for hearing loss. in online videos aimed at young people kelly talks about ways they risk damaging their hearing. after learning about. the issue about how widespread it is and how it's a global health topic it really changed my behavior i didn't necessarily limit how much i was involved in music and stuff like that i just changed my approach to it and i'm just much more cautious now about how you know how much exposure i'm getting but few young people are likely to take similar precautions even when they know the risks i mean for a lot of people especially young people the appeal to a loud noise is just so it's so big that like it's so fun to put in your headphones or just blast at full volume it's so fun to put your speakers on in your room and

last a full volume or go to a party and stand right next to speakers and feel a little bass in your chair feel the vibrations it's fun and that's why a lot of people do it. people just have to realize the tradeoff of short term pleasure versus long term pleasure yeah if you have a lot of the short term pleasure of loud noises everywhere in your headphones and at parties and events then you're going to miss out on the long term pleasure of just even being able to hear in general later in life. loud music is one of the main causes of hearing loss. but that doesn't stop most of us from enjoying it. we just encourage people to be more cautious about how loud the sound is and take notice when it is too loud. we want people to grow up knowing that protecting their hearing is important we

want to be normal and and cool i have. ear plugs that fit right on my key jane and i bring those everywhere with me and if it's too loud i pop in and really people don't notice that they're in your ear unless they're actually looking for it these are great because they. they filter out high frequency sound and allow you to still hear everything so have conversations with people and it just you can hear things better. hearing is the ability to perceive sounds but what it gives us goes far beyond that. this principle combined with his own experience gave a rush the idea for his business. about children are now dark dining allows people to rediscover their other senses in this setting the sense of hearing becomes something almost magical you know the guests spend a couple of hours talking to a stranger they can't see it creates an instant bond our hearing allows us to

intimately connect with the people around us you went to a world of emotion of laughter and can picture what your environment and the people around you might look like but it's funny when people leave the restaurant and actually see each other then they greet each other as if for the 1st time even though they've just spent the last 2 hours chatting. with the guests are greeted by blind waiters who lead them into a dining area that is pitch black out. there they must rely on their hearing to orient themselves and communicate with the other diners most of the rest of the book. as we film here we too can only rely on our ears and the power of our imaginations. on. the bones one is a mess. so when the guests leave the restaurant they notice

a heightened sense of hearing smell and touch. it's as though taking away their ability to see rewired and enhance their other senses. this is the 1st time they can actually see what they. 8. to at least not when i had the feeling that my other senses were more intense partly because the ambient noise was somehow different. from when you enter a dark quest count the 1st thing you hear is the other guests come to sing that from the start of speaking quietly then at the end when you leave everyone is speaking really loudly the atmosphere is great their senses feel alternate you focus on the person you're speaking to much more i had never really thought about the importance of hearing. this experience gave us a whole new perspective so just very interesting that we notice things we wouldn't normally notice the battle for the.

researchers in getting and hope the opto genetic code clearer implants will help people with hearing impairments distinguish a wider variety of sounds. hues algae proteins to render nerve cells light sensitive. one kind of heart. even if you've lost your hair cells you still have the corresponding nerve cells. in flats where we use a viral vector to position the lights which. is very long the nerve fibers and then the cell bodies and then when the light from the coakley or implant hits it it triggers the light switch and stimulates the nerves are. just it's often ultimately

we bypassed the degraded hair cells and their sign abscess and activate the nerve cell directly. defect i don't know if it's are. genetically reprogramming cells in the coakley or is a bio chem. process that is still being clinically tested it's not ready for human trials the stall is. as good. that's a the great part is it works very well with this and we can see that the l.e.d.s. provide an improved resolution in connecticut slits are in experiments with rodents and we recently showed that there was no difference between a hearing with a light and acoustic hearing and soft and medium sound ranges which is the size of the skin also it's just as good which in the next few months we'll be able to quantify this advantage was in weeks. there.

at the getting an institute studies of monkeys are helping scientists refine and optimize optical see eyes cage one particular species are the closest proxy researchers have to the human brain when it comes to hearing and speech. to the right side so. we are right by special often this is an exact line work with marmosets which are very small monkeys that way around 400 grams also there are about the same size as the nowhere for perfect animals to experiment with a nice field of auditory research because they operate with an unusually broad vocal repertoire in a social context in short they communicate with sounds which is of course very interesting for auditory researchers and scientists. in one experiment with marmosets a monkey is led to believe that another is calling out the sounds are gradually

modified to resemble the quality of a coakley or implant so the researchers can determine at what point they become unintelligible. what's interesting about this experiment is that the same vocalization sounds are usually used by both animals commune. caters for us in the wild animals can end up separated from the group but when that happens when they're a bit far from the group say forging for food on another tree it's going to be vocalized with long distance contact calls so called the costs if you know him if you can hear them very clearly wealthy call is answered with a b. call and this form of vocal interaction occurs when the monkeys can't see one another so i can take advantage of that and replace one of the monkeys with a computer simulated call then i can modify the call to explore the effects of a cochlear implant with various channels. will the same vocalization still occur on the monkey keep responding with a b. call. with their special communication skills marmosets could provide

researchers with the key to a new form of hearing in humans venison something. we hope to demonstrate the viability of an obstacle cochlear implant income that is to show that it can function significantly better than an electrical cochlear implants will fit in this would be of its best improvement for patients we could then not only improve auditorium freshens but also bring about a fundamental improvement of the overall hearing experience thought that such a challenging and very exciting prospect. but. it will take another few years of research and testing before the 1st patients can be fitted with optical coakley or implants. the researchers at the institute in getting in are trying a number of different approaches. one group is investigating ways to help

people here again without any technical ends. soon as you know walk this is a sensory cell in the in a uses a very unusual mechanism with very unusual molecules to transmit signals to the nerve cell for gets very different compared to the sign ups in the brain that we have a pretty good idea of which proteins are used to signal transmission can be a nose in the in a a way less familiar with the molecules that play a role but we know that one of them is a toe furlan a very large protein we know that if it's not then no signals are transmitted from the sensory cells to the neurons in previous studies we establish that low levels of otoh if in the membrane are enough to cause deafness in a member. the researchers have identified a form of deafness related to a patient's physical state a sort of on off deafness. there are patients who have more

or less normal hearing a normal body temperatures they might have a little trouble understanding speech but interestingly when they have a fever a temperature of 38 degrees or above they're almost completely deaf and when we looked into this and found that this otoh furlan protein is so temperature sensitive that at a high temperature it completely disappears from the plasma membrane and. based on these findings researchers have developed an approach that allows them to fully restore hearing yeah my natal used a line of deaf mice who lacked the genes for otay ferland in other words they were at a further and deficient with the help of 2 viruses we succeeded in reintroducing the gene that in codes it into the sensory cells as we were able to at least partially restore hearing in these mice the next step is to do the same with humans 1st we have to find soon our approach and improve the level of hearing we can restore

schools but we hope to be able to offer gene therapy to people who have been related deafness on this but allow them to hear much better than with an electrical or optical cochlear implant and. hearing compliments what we see it completes the world we experience. in that complex of our senses hearing is a dimension of its own. it gives us our spatial awareness. lets us feel distance and intensity. in evolutionary terms our hearing is attuned to the sounds of nature. we can detect even the slightest noises from far away. 6 animals can hear even better than humans

for humans the sounds of nature are associated primarily with rest and relaxation. and less with hunting and personal protection. for humans today other aspects of hearing play a more important role. charles mckenna's research aims to ensure people will continue to be able to hear well as they age despite damaging environmental influences. he's collaborating with harvard medical school in boston and researching the bone of the cochlea as a docking point for drugs that can cure hearing impairment. we have been working on the ball velcro concept in this really is a way to create images for diagnosis of diseases of the ball and and

so we had created an imaging probe that delivers a fluorescent imaging agent to a ball. originally intended to identify bone damage and asked you know perot's this the substance was shown to work here perfectly to the bone structure of the coakley. we tried and we saw the compounds can beautifully imaged the cochlea similar bone structure of the year that's where we begin to think if the bisphosphonate can reach the structure why not give it a cargo a drug to carry into the structure so that that drug could work in the structure and their drugs already existing that have promise for curing diseases of the year that have a delivery problem you can't keep them in this cochlear structure and so the

idea of the bond is if you can get the drug into the interior of the cochlear it stays there and how to get it to stay there you encourage to the ball. until now the fluid exchange that takes place in the coakley meant that substances couldn't get here there and be effective. at harvard medical school in boston researchers are working on substances that should be able to reverse hearing impairment and hearing loss in the coakley. we. knew about such a drug and they said you know is there a way to take your bones all crawl and combine it with this drug and so we thought about it and we said yes we can do it. the challenge for the biochemists lies in anchoring the substances to restore hearing in the bone without causing complications or i think what we're aiming

for is a drug of a complete delivered to the year to the inner ear and in the ideal case a single dose would be effective but it might be several those this is something we don't know yet the dosage that dosing regimen and so forth. lengthy testing and approval process is mean it will be years before a drug can be marketed. purslane that's really i'm very confident. but i'm also a realist as a scientist you are objective you know the statistics on the other hand. you you have to feel confident that you can beat these statistics otherwise why would you attempt this endeavor in the 1st place. los angeles alone is home to

millions of people who would benefit from such a medicine. and there's no question given the obvious need we're talking about as substantial percentage of people around the world. world's population is what 7 or 8000000000 people a significant percentage of those persons have hearing disability of various degrees and so naturally. they have hope that someone perhaps us perhaps another group will come up with the drug can help them. our hearing has to be able to withstand the demands of everyday life it helps us orient ourselves and sometimes it lets us shut out the world. hearing is one way to maintain social contact it's a source of pleasure. most people hardly notice how their hearing slowly

changes how their ability to hear and therefore communicate with others fades over time. to some extent our sense of sight can compensate for hearing loss. but nothing can replace the wonder of hearing. the world is moving in the right direction the world is moving towards kerry without hearing much more and again it hasn't even been a problem for dialogue and there are so many different problems that have existed since like since the dawn of man it's l.a. all the like heart problems and just like all these general health conditions and site but it's a loud noises really like like continuous exposure to loud noises really only blew up in the sense like the industrial revolution so it's only been in the last like

let's say 150 years that people will start to be exposed like on a daily basis to noises that will really damage your hearing. if it is astounding i'm amazed by how much information exchange through that change through here and i'm mostly fascinated by how closely hearing is linked to emotions that is when i hear music the time a while and like very much just thinking about it gives me goosebumps all brings tears to my eyes no other scents can do that not even the sense of sight which also allows us to absorb information but what i see doesn't touch me as deeply as what i hear it's. just that in constant talk. and these new contract states which means in this all day long we are transmitting information at crazy speeds from contact points between the sensory cells and the auditory nerve is enough as i think the sign up says release messenger substances all day long as

it's and the whole thing happens with a temporal precision of less than a millisecond i think and that's its own phone number it is called the c.e.o. of wood and all this has been developed from proteins and ions on the like here this year it's fascinating that is that sage i've got no fuss. because he comes home says something new kind of well. by way to lose my hearing i would be very depressed because deep. it would probably be the end of my social life no visa for moving here if i ever lost my hearing i would probably wonder if life was still with me here today because we were both electrician continual suppose like a home. you know everything begins with the discovery. to have made this kind of discovery together with my colleagues. it's enormously satisfying. this is really what inspires our work because

we are thinking always about care and the work we are doing ultimately help some of these people. she helps refugees however she can with clothes food and compassion fellow hard yasmina who she ditched isn't any worker in bosnia. she's supporting migrants perseverance here in the freezing cold like yes mina herself along with many fellow volunteers is coming under pressure. and some good sponger are. in 90 minutes on d w. 4 all set to go beyond furious

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