Ever wonder why buffalo wings always smell so awesome when a football game is blaring in the room? Scientists have proposed that the way food smells could possibly be related to the sounds we hear when we consume them.
They note that there could be a connection between smell and sound, a hybrid sense they call “smound.” The theory is in findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Daniel Wesson made the possible neural connection quite by accident when he was studying the olfactory tubercle, a structure at the base of the brain that aids odor detection. He was observing mice when he put his coffee mug down. The clunk of the mug hitting the desk produced a spike in the mice’s olfactory tubercle activity.
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When Beethoven got frustrated with his deafness and was struggling to hear the music that he had composed, music historians report that he laid his piano down on the floor without the legs and pounded the keys loudly in an attempt to feel the vibrations. Other times, he tried to hear by clenching a stick tightly between his teeth with one end touching the piano so the sound could transfer from the piano to the stick, and then travel through his teeth to finally reach his ear.
We aren’t sure how much of his music he heard this way, but a new device uses some of the same conduction techniques to restore hearing to people who are deaf in one ear. Thanks to a couple centuries of technological enhancement, there are now no sticks involved.
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From 80Beats:
A noisy Italian disco may not seem like a conducive location for scientific experiments, but for a couple of researchers investigating hearing and language processing it was perfect. The undercover scientists studied clubbers who were trying to talk while the music was pumping, and found that they showed a decided preference for speaking into each other’s right ears. What’s more, when the researchers approached clubbers with a request for a cigarette, they found the unwitting test subjects were much more likely to comply if the petition was made in the right ear.
Previous lab studies have also suggested that “humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out” [Wired.com]. Researchers say this bias holds true for both lefties and righties.
Golf might seem like a relatively safe sport, but a new report in the British Medical Journal suggests there’s a hidden danger: hearing loss. Turns out, the loud thwaak! of the new thin-faced titanium drivers is about as loud as a gunshot or firecracker—loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage.
British doctors first tuned in to the problem after a 55-year-old male patient sought treatment for mysterious tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. The doctors confirmed that his symptoms matched those of noise-induced hearing loss, although the man’s occupation didn’t involve loud noises. The puzzle finally came together when the man revealed that for the past 18 months, he’d been teeing off with a King Cobra LD titanium driver three times a week. But the sound from the club had become so irritating that he’d already ditched the club. The doctors also found other golfers online who’d had similar complaints about the “sonic boom” created by the new drivers.
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