CANCELLED: Perspectives from a long career in Hearing Research Seminar
- Time:
- 12:00 - 13:00
- Date:
- 18 March 2020
- Venue:
- B19/3011
For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Vanui Mardanyan on 44 (0)23 8059 2277 or email hsg@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
ISVR Hearing and Balance Centre Research Seminar
Perspectives from a long career in Hearing Research - ISVR Hearing and Balance Centre Research Seminar
A week is a long time in politics and 40 years is a very very long time in hearing research. When I began my career the vibration patterns of the basilar membrane were thought to be broadly tuned, cochlear implantation had not been attempted and oto-acoustic emissions had yet to be discovered. The pace of discovery has been such that to survive and thrive in research over this period it has been necessary to continuously innovate and reinvent oneself. Over the years, my research group has explored a number of brain regions in several species and I will briefly describe some of the contributions that we have made to a number of diverse areas of hearing science such as OAEs, neurophysiology and fMRI. That done, I will focus in more detail a couple of these contributions in areas that are still somewhat controversial. The first of these is binaural hearing and the second is the sharpness of tuning in the human cochlea.
The two major cues for binaural localisation of sounds are interaural level and time differences. It now appears that decoding both interaural level difference and interaural time difference cues for localizing a sound may involve similar non-topographic population codes which vary in complementary ways in each hemisphere.
Whether human cochlear tuning is sharper than that of animal models remains controversial. Part of this uncertainty rests upon the indirect methods that are used to estimate such tuning from oto-acoustic emissions. By using a single animal model and estimating tuning from auditory nerve measurements, oto-acoustic emissions and psychophysical measurements we concluded that the human cochlea is most likely to be more sharply tuned that other animals.
Speaker information
Professor Alan Palmer , University of Nottingham. Alan Palmer received his first degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Birmingham UK in 1972 and his PhD in Communication and Neuroscience from the University of Keele UK in 1977. After establishing his own laboratory at the National Institute for Medical Research in London in 1979 he held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Sussex (1983-1985). He became a programme leader at the MRC Institute of Hearing Research (IHR) in 1986 and Honorary Professor of Neuroscience, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Nottingham (1998). He was successively appointed to Assistant Director (2004) and Deputy Director (2008) and finally served for three years as Director of IHR (2012-2015). From 2012 to 2015 he was a research Area Lead for the NIHR Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit. When IHR became part of the University of Nottingham (2016) he became a Professor of Neuroscience with the University. He was awarded the Hartmann Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2016, the Award of Merit of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (2017) and an Honorary PhD from the Maximillian University of Munich (2017). Until his retirement in 2016, he led a research team that used neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and imaging techniques to study the way the brain processes sound and the mechanisms of tinnitus.