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First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device 29

Posted by BeauHD from the next-gen-hearing-aids dept.
Researchers at Columbia demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system that can identify which speaker a listener is focusing on in a noisy environment and automatically amplify that voice while suppressing others. "This breakthrough addresses the 'cocktail party effect,' a major limitation of conventional hearing aids, which often struggle to distinguish between overlapping conversations in noisy settings," reports Neuroscience News. From the report: In the new study, Columbia researchers teamed up with surgeons and their epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to better pinpoint the sources of their seizures. The hospital patients, who volunteered to be part of this study, already had electrodes implanted in their brains. [senior author Nima Mesgarani's] system used the electrodes to measure the brain activity of the patients as they focused on one of two overlapping conversations played simultaneously. The system then automatically detected which conversation a patient was paying attention to and adjusted the volume in real time, turning up that conversation while quieting the other. For one volunteer, the experience of controlling the system with her brain was literally unbelievable. She accused the researchers of secretly adjusting the volumes. Others told stories about friends and family with hearing impairments who could benefit from such a technology. One person said: "It seems like science fiction."

[...] The scientists developed real-time machine-learning algorithms that could examine the brainwaves and identify which conversation the patients were paying attention to. Once deployed, their system could rapidly deduce which conversation each listener was paying attention to and make it easier for them to hear it. This happened both when the researchers guided the subjects toward a particular conversation, and when the subjects chose freely, as would be necessary in a real-world conversation. "For this to work in real time, the system has to be very fast, accurate and stable for the experience to feel pleasant for the listener," Dr. Mesgarani said. The scientists found their new system correctly identified which conversation the volunteers paid attention to. This dramatically improved the intelligibility of the speech the volunteers focused on, reduced listening effort, and was consistently preferred by the volunteers when compared to conversations the system did not provide assistance with. One volunteer recalled her uncle, who had hearing problems. "Can you imagine if this technology existed in a world [where] ... he could access it? He might actually live a much more peaceful... life." The research has been published in Nature Neuroscience.

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First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device

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  • This has my rapt attention! My hearing loss is accompanied by that nasty cocktail party effect. Along with tinnitus. My noggin processes all sounds equally, so the background noise is given the same importance as whoever I'm talking to. And that doesn't work.

    Hearing aids can help a little, but after about 15 minutes, I'm exhausted. If this works, I'll sign right up.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, let me know what the backscatter machine sounds like when you go through security.

      • I have a cochlear implant, and on some theft detector models - not all - I hear a low level "brrrrr" as I walk through. The coil from the implant picks up the waves from the detector. The body scanners at the airport make no noise that I can pick up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by r0nc0 ( 566295 )
      Same here ~ it's a challenge to go to parties or just go out to dinner because I literally can't hear the other person speaking. It's like an overloaded radio receiver frontend that can't hear the station right next to it because it's drowned out by the stronger signals around it. Hearing aids helped the tinnitus some and the reduced hearing more but nothing to be done for helping distinguish who is talking. My hearing aids have the ability to change the "focus" but it doesn't work very well.
    • All the above hearing issues.  Seems so primitive, but I have come to rely on  'hand written notes'. That's like using a chalk-board and power-series expansion to find: sin<0.25> .  Any implant treatment is good news for me.
    • My cochlear implant - Spectra 22 from the mid-90s - has a 2.5mm input jack so I can connect a microphone and isolate the sound source. If we're in a restaurant, or driving, for example, my wife will wear it under chin so I pick up her voice almost exclusively. If we're in a crowd, and moving about, it's not as convenient, so I'm at the mercy of a flood of noise.

      • My cochlear implant - Spectra 22 from the mid-90s - has a 2.5mm input jack so I can connect a microphone and isolate the sound source. If we're in a restaurant, or driving, for example, my wife will wear it under chin so I pick up her voice almost exclusively. If we're in a crowd, and moving about, it's not as convenient, so I'm at the mercy of a flood of noise.

        Did not know they had a mic jack. That's a nice addition.

  • I have two hearing impaired elders in my life. Voice to text fails for the same reason as hearing aids; everything gets converted to text. The fallback is just yelling or hand written notes.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by flyingfsck ( 986395 )
      Yelling doesn't work either. The problem is SINAD: Signal/(Noise+Distortion). Yelling amplifies the signal and the distortion and makes echos off the walls too. When talking to a deaf person like me, first turn off other sources of sound: TV, radio, lawn mowers, chain saws - get everyone else to shut up and then just talk a little more loudly and a little more slowly maybe as well.
      • Bingo. Even my son, who grew up with me being deaf and is probably the person I understand the best, will jack up a song he wants me to hear - I have a cochlear implant, now - until I tell him it's not volume: it's clarity. Too loud, and it distorts, and I won't understand it. People who speak louder, thinking they're helping, are actually kind of annoying.
        • People who speak louder, thinking they're helping, are actually kind of annoying.

          How very, very true, especially when you've already told them that speaking louder won't help, but clearer will. But there's one thing that's worse. I have a notch in my hearing, caused by exposure to too much outbound on the Gun Line back in '72, and some women's voices fall right into the range I can't really hear. Most of the time it's not too bad because women are usually good about shifting their voice down to a lowe

  • Neuralink will be the first to do this second.

  • Advances (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @11:19AM (#66140058)
    My friend has a fancy hearing aid, and it has a setting where it focuses in on the voice of the person he is looking at. I think it's even called party mode. It cancels most noises except for the closest person his head is aimed at. He can tweak the sensitivity to the point he can clearly hear people talking from several tables away at a noisy restaurant, if he looks directly at the speaker.

  • I have severe hearing loss in the high frequency range. Hearing aids only help the tiniest bit in some situations. Simply turning up the volume doesn't solve the problem. This tech would be useless for me

  • My Sony camcorder has a function called Zoom Mic that does just this... the camcorder came out in 2008.
    Turn the function on, aim it at something and let it focus, zoom in... you'll hear what it's focused on pretty damn well.

    The more processing applied to the hearing aid, means more delay, and most likely it'll have to offload that processing to the cloud through your cellphone over Bluetooth, which introduces more delay.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My Sony camcorder has a function called Zoom Mic that does just this... the camcorder came out in 2008. Turn the function on, aim it at something and let it focus, zoom in... you'll hear what it's focused on pretty damn well.

      Zoom Mic was functional by utilizing a form of mid-side stereo [wikipedia.org] and the auto-focus feature of the camera. This technology is talking about doing it with algorithmic analysis of the voice of whomever the wearer is focused on based upon specific brain activity.

      The more processing applied to the hearing aid, means more delay, and most likely it'll have to offload that processing to the cloud through your cellphone over Bluetooth, which introduces more delay.

      You clearly haven't worked with higher end audio lately. There are plenty of devices that are extremely low latency, small, and have built-in processing beyond, say, a Bluetooth chip, and, to be blunt, we're always hearing about processors getting smal

      • Latency is still latency, though.
        You can shrink the processor as much as you want, but the more processing power you pack into that AirPod or smaller device, the shorter the battery life.
        That's why you'd have your phone handle the heavy-lifting in the processor department.

        The "Me Too" products will, of course, be the junk that's sold on Temu or similar for a fraction of the price, and doesn't have the functions that the expensive ones to, even though the listing 'claims' to.
        The legit ones will still be well

  • This sounds like a great advancement, my Mother could use something like this.

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