A brain-controlled system may help listeners with hearing loss cut through the noise

Scientists say they've developed brain-decoding technology that could help people who use hearing assistance devices pick out one voice in a crowded room — a longstanding challenge for hearing aids. Matteo Farinella/Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute hide caption toggle caption Matteo Farinella/Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute Imagine a crowded room. It's a chaos of sound, teeming with indistinct voices. Scientists call this the cocktail party problem . To overcome it, most people are able to focus on a single speaker's voice, which cues the brain to amplify that sound and turn down the rest. For people who use hearing aids, though, that process becomes a lot harder. Now, in the journal Nature Neuroscience , a team describes a solution that decodes a person's brain waves to choose which voice their hearing system will amplify. It amounts to a "brain-controlled hearing aid," says Nima Mesgarani , an author of the paper and an associate professor at Columbia University who runs the school's Neural Acoustic Processing Lab. The new approach could lead to better hearing technology, including hearing aids, assistive listening devices and cochlear implants. But so far, the approach has been tested only on four people with typical hearing, says Josh McDermott , who runs the Laboratory for Computational Audition at MIT and was not involved in the study. Whether the system will work as well for people with hearing loss remains an "open question," he says. …