Cochlear Implants & Award Winners

Researchers say cochlear implants have allowed more than 1 million people around the world to hear, in some cases for the very first time. The five pioneering researchers who made this possible are now receiving the Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology for their decades of work. The cochlear implant is the first medical device to interface with the nervous system to provide a sense of hearing. The implants were first commercially available back in the 1980s. All five researchers will be honored at MIT next week for their life's work. Joining us now is Doctor Michael Mirza, who will be the upcoming recipient of the Merkin Prize for his studies in hearing. Doctor, thank you for joining us today. Nice to be with you, Jennifer. And I'd like to start with why you chose to go into the field of neuroscience and cochlear implants initially. Well, I was interested in hearing I was interested in the language. I was interested in how you account for our humanity and our human abilities as it relates to the operations of the brain. And and I was also interested in hearing and deafness. And so all of those things sort of converged in the studies, in the work on development of cochlear implants. Can you explain how neuroscience and electrical signals from the brain are part of what and how we actually here? Well, in the hearing organ you have a wonderful sensory cell population, which are called hair cells, which actually converts sound into electoral signals that that engage the hearing nerve and that hearing nerd feeds information to the brain that represents what we hear. And it actually devolves sound as a function of frequency, low frequencies on one end of the of the band, high frequencies on the other, so it separately represents them, delivers in the brain in a in a beautifully organized way. And so that's how hearing ordinarily works. But when someone loses their hearing, especially when the hearing loss is profound, what happens is, is that the sensory cells die, but the nerve is commonly still intact. It's sitting there waiting to be excited artificially by something like a cochlear implant. And when we hear the term cochlear implant, how does that different from a hearing aid? Well, a hearing aid basically is trying to make up. It's trying to use the hearing you have retained and trying to make the most of it. In a cochlear implant, you haven't generally retained any hearing. You're deaf. You maybe had hearing before, but now you have none. So you're you're left in a silent world, a quiet world where you can't hear the people that you love. Would love to talk to a new day. You're deaf to the sounds of the world you live in. And so what a cochlear implant does is it excites the hearing nerve directly by electrically shocking it in a patterned way, simulating the normal information that that it would deliver to the brain is if you could hear and if the hearing organ were intact. So it's a it's a bit of trickery and trying to figure out how to how to control simulation in the ear so that you can deliver enough information to the brain. The brain can sort of figure out what's happening out there in the world of sound. It's fascinating. Now, the Merkin Prize that you're going to receive on September 15th, it's awarded by MIT and Harvard. How does this recognition put your life's work into perspective? Well, first of all, it's a team effort. You know, lots of engineering and neuroscience and medicine and medical efforts have gone into it to make it happen. And it happened not just in our laboratory but in other laboratories in the world. So it's a it's a team effort. It's a it's a national effort. It's an international achievement. But what a wonderful thing it is for it to be acknowledged for those teams. And what a wonderful the thing it is for it to be used as the example of what can happen when we all work together to solve some seemingly impossible problem. And that's the miracle of restoring hearing in someone that can hear nothing. And what it means to those individuals who can hear nothing, that have that hearing restored is a beautiful thing to see. How widespread is the use of these implants? There's about a million of them out there, and they're being applied at a relatively high rate. So, you know, ultimately they're reaching a substantial fraction of the individuals in the world who are profoundly deaf. And more and more, they're being applied to people that are born deaf, to children that are born deaf, that can reestablish in early life, relatively normal hearing ability, operating in the in the dominant native language that they happen to be living in. Well, congratulations. Which is the language of their oral speech. Congratulations to you. We are all so happy for you. It sounds like you've just done remarkable work throughout your life. Thank you. It's been great. It's great. Very nice to talk with you, Jennifer. And all of this work has been highly rewarding and great fun by working with a wonderful team of individuals. Thank you, Doctor Michael Myers, for joining us today.