The people in the queue behind him became irritated and impatient, not one realising that this lively, intelligent man had simply not heard what was being said incidents like this happen regularly to a11 deaf people and leave them feeling frustrated, lost and lonely. Some people think that being blind would be worse than becoming deaf, but it you become old and ill, simultaneously losing the ability to hear can leave you feeling isolated at a time when you need to communicate with your loved ones most. As Professor Ted Evans, a well-known auditory physiologist who works in Keele, says 'blindness cuts people off from the world of things, but deafness cuts them off from other people'. To illustrate this, I will describe three main lines of auditory research at Keele. To discuss these, I need to tell you first a little about how the ear works.
Sounds are air waves which enter through the external ear canal and vibrate the ear drum.
This in turn produces vibrations in a chain of tiny bones in the middle ear. The middle ear cavity is kept at the same pressure as the outside world by a little tube,the Eustachian tube, which runs down from the middle ear to the back of the throat. The last of the little bones, the stapes, transmits the sounds to fluids in the hearing part of the ear, the cochlea, by vibrating against another tiny membrane, the oval window at the cochlear base. It is this membrane which moves as sound enters the cochlear fluids. The frequencies in between have their maximum effects at points strung out between like the notes along a piano keyboard Sticking up from the basilar membrane, four rows of tiny hairs can be seen.