LWB Newsletter 16th May 2024
You may have seen this week that The Guardian ran an article about a child that had their hearing restored.
The 18 month old, called Opal, has auditory neuropathy, a genetic disease that causes deafness by not allowing signals from the ear to reach the hearing nerve.
She is part of the CHORD trial, which uses gene therapy to correct the faulty gene.
Reactions to this news are mixed.
Many Deaf people are against this kind of intervention, as they see it as further attacks on their language and culture.
Publishing this during Deaf Awareness Week just added insult to injury as it’s a week where sign language and deaf culture are celebrated.
However many people who lost their hearing in later life, and aren’t part of the deaf community, welcomed the news and would love to have their hearing restored.
Other research is focused on solving the problem of understanding speech in noise and working out where sound is coming from.
This article published in Science Daily discusses research from Marcquarie University, which changes a 75 year old theory about how our brains work out where sound is coming from. The previous theory was that humans had a complicated neural network for sound localisation.
Hearing aid technology has been based around this theory.
However researchers found that the process is much simpler, and carried out by a much smaller neural network.
This research could mean changes in the way hearing aids and smartphones are developed, meaning there could be big improvements in the future.
If you’re interested in improving your wellbeing, I have a new 8 week Mindfulness course starting in June. No previous experience of mindfulness is necessary. Reply to this email if you have any questions.
Last week may have been deaf awareness week, but it’s something we face everyday.
Work can be especially stressful, so if things start changing at work it can cause more worry
This weeks blog post is about how to cope with it.
Talk soon,
Sue.
Founder of Live Work Breathe