50 Years Ago Biophysics,Health Artificial hearing has come a long way since 1960s
Excerpt from the July 23, 1966, issue of Science News
By Cassie Martin 12:00pm, July 7, 2016 
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? Cochlear implants have helped deaf people hear for decades. New technology may expand the frequencies that humans can hear.
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"Hearing" electrically — A deaf person has been able to “hear” as a result of direct electrical excitation of auditory nerve fibers. But what he can hear may not make much sense…. Although speech-modulated stimuli were not understood, they were unerringly recognized as speech, mainly by rhythm and volume cues…. Optimism about the possibility of an artificial sense organ is now slightly more justifiable. — Science News, July 23, 1966
UPDATE
First developed in the late 1970s, cochlear implants became available in 1984 for deaf people who wanted to hear. Today, more than 300,000 people worldwide wear the small electronic devices, which translate sound into electrical signals that travel directly to the brain via the auditory nerve. The implants don’t fully restore hearing, but they enable processing of human speech. The next wave of implants may replace electrical signals with lasers and LEDs to boost the frequencies users can hear and more accurately reproduce sound.
Further Reading
S. Schwartz. Gene therapy restores hearing in mice. Science News Online, July 8, 2015.
B. Brookshire. How brains filter signal from the noise. Science News Online, April 29, 2014.
A. Yeager. Gene therapy with electrical pulses spurs nerve growth. Science News Online, April 23, 2014.
R. Ehrenberg. Imaging technique offers look inside hearing loss. Science News. Vol. 183, March 9, 2013, p. 8.
T.H. Saey. Stem cells may help in treating deafness. Science News. Vol. 182, October 20, 2012, p. 9.
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Artificial hearing has come a long way since 1960s
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