063 - David Eagleman - Neosensory's Buzz and The Next Generation of Hearing Science (feat. Jacque Scholl, AuD & Kevin Liebe, AuD)

Guests: David Eagleman, Neuroscientist at Stanford and Co-founder/CEO of Neosensory; Jacque Scholl, clinical Audiologist; Kevin Liebe, clinical Audiologist and President/CEO at HearingHealthMatters.org  Topic: Neosensory's Buzz and The Next Generation of Hearing Science Dave is joined this week by David Eagleman, neuroscientist and NYT best-selling author, and two audiologists, Jacque Scholl and Kevin Liebe, to talk about David's company, Neosensory, and the wrist-worn wearable the company has designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, The Buzz. The Buzz converts ambient sound into haptic vibrations using vibratory motors. The idea is that as the user continually wears The Buzz for extended periods of time, the user's brain will naturally begin to re-wire itself to better process and make sense of the subtleties in vibrations and what each vibration represents. This device stems from the research and work David has been conducting in his lab for years around sensory substitution, which he goes into thorough detail about throughout his newest NYT best-selling book, Livewired.  Jacque provides the perspective of both an audiologist and a mother to a 13 year old deaf daughter, Jade, who has been wearing The Buzz for months. According to Jacque, Jade has seen a dramatic increase in her speech improvement and ability to discriminate speech. In addition, The Buzz serves as a body-worn alerting device as it helps to notify Jade that there are sounds coming from behind her or in the distance. As Kevin mentions, The Buzz provides "tri-modal" communication as it complements speech and lip-reading as a third modality to provide even more context to the user. Transcript: here --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/futureear/message