Using Haptic Technology to Address Hearing Loss and Tinnitus: Interview with Dr. David Eagleman

Brian Taylor 0:10
Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Hearing. I’m Brian Taylor. And this week we have a special guest – probably the most well known guest we’ve had in our program to date. He’s someone from outside the profession. It’s David Eagleman. David is a neuroscientist, CEO, professor, and author. And probably a few other things besides that. Some of you might even be familiar with his work on PBS. I know, that’s where I got to know who he was from his PBS series the brain back in maybe 2015 or 2016. So welcome, Professor Eagleman.

David Eagleman 0:47
Great to be here, Brian, thank you.

Brian Taylor 0:48
Did I miss anything about your background that we should highlight? You’re a renaissance man.

David Eagleman 0:55
Nothing important.

Brian Taylor 0:57
All right. Well, I wanted… you’ve written several books. And in fact that last couple of nights, I’ve been reading your Livewired book, and I wanted to start the conversation talking about the concept of sensory substitution, and what that really entails.

David Eagleman 1:15
Yeah, so this is this is something my lab has been studying for, oh gosh 15 year now. The idea is this, your brain is locked in silence and darkness in the skull, and it doesn’t know what’s out there. So it just has these different portals to the world where here it can collect electromagnetic radiation. And here it can collect air compression waves and here mixtures of molecules. But these are all ways of trying to find important information sources from the outside world, all of this stuff gets converted into spikes, little electrochemical signals in the brain. And that’s the language of the brain, that’s all it has is spikes running around in the dark. But the key is, it doesn’t know where the spikes come from, it doesn’t know Oh, these are from these were originally generated by photons, or air compression waves, or molecules, or whatever. So this led to this idea that actually, maybe you could push information into the brain via unusual channels. And the brain doesn’t care where it originally came from. All it needs to know is, hey, how can I use this? How does this correlate with other information that I’m getting on other data cables, so that I can put together a picture of what’s happening in the world. And this is the idea of sensory substitution. And the first demonstration of this was, was actually in the late 1800s. But the first published demonstration was in 1969, where a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a chair that had a solenoid grid that would poke them in the back. And he would put things in front of a video camera, like let’s say, a telephone in front of the video camera, and they would feel the telephone poked in front of their back, when you put a face in front of a camera, they feel a face poked in their back or whatever shape and then feel. And people got really good at being able to tell what was in front of them. This was people who are blind, they could feel what was in the skin of their back and figure out how to see that way. So this was an example of pushing visual information through the, you know, through touch, and people could figure out what was going on. And so my lab got very interested in sensory substitution with hearing loss. So we built, originally it was a vest with vibratory motors on it, and it would capture sound, and then the sound would get translated into patterns of vibration on the skin. And what we were doing essentially is breaking the sound into frequencies from high to low, and representing on a different spots on the skin. And that’s what your inner ear does, of course, your cochlea is just capturing sound and breaking it up from high to low frequency, shipping it off to the brain and spikes, and then you feel like oh, you’re hearing my voice. So that’s what we did. I presented that a TED about six years ago and then spun this out of my lab as a company. And in the meantime what we’ve done is we’ve shrunk this down to a wristband – so the wristband has vibratory motors around it and we can capture sound and turn it into patterns of vibration on the skin and people who are totally deaf you know, severe-profound hearing loss can can come to understand what is happening in the outside world in the auditory world by having that information pushed in through their skin, gets to their brain, their brain figures out the correlations for example, you watch a dog’s mouth and you feel the barking on your skin and you your brain puts it together and says oh, okay, I got it and you you know you slam the door you ring the doorbell you watch you know, baby’s crying, you clap your own hands, whatever you figure out what how these things are related in your brain comes to hear through your skin.

Brian Taylor 4:59
It’s Unbelievable how you’ve turned the skin into the, substituting the cochlea, basically,

David Eagleman 5:06
Exactly right, we’ve taken from the ear and push it onto the skin. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

Brian Taylor 5:10
Right. So I’m curious to know about the Buzz product that you’ve just described that’s worn on the wrist. Primarily, our audience is made up of hearing care professionals and people that wear hearing aids and cochlear implants. Can you maybe share with us a couple of examples of somebody that maybe was wearing an implant or a hearing aid and how Buzz complemented or supplemented their existing technology?

David Eagleman 5:36
Yes, we, you know, the truth is that I originally felt and still feel in some way that this is a replacement for cochlear implants or hearing aids. But a lot of people, a lot of our customers have told us that they wear both and find a lot of value out of that. So what several people have told us that this, they feel this gives them three dimensional hearing. And all they mean by that is they can see something like lips moving, they hear something through their tech through their hearing aids or cochlear implants. And they feel information on their Buzz on their wrist. And collectively, these three things sharpen the probability distributions for them, so that they really feel like they’re getting a much clearer sense of what’s going on. Because the brain is fundamentally multi sensory, what it’s trying to do is understand what’s going on in the outside world through any of these channels of information that it can pull in. So if you’ve got three different ways that you’re trying to verify what is getting said that helps people enormously so sort of, to my surprise, it turns out a lot of our customers wear this in conjunction with hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Brian Taylor 6:43
Right. And I think that you’ve developed something for tinnitus as well called Duo. A program. Can you give us your thoughts, tell us about that?

David Eagleman 6:50
Yeah, so we launched this one year ago. This is based on bimodal stimulation, which just means you’re hearing sounds and you’re feeling something on your skin at the same time. And this wasn’t our idea, this was originally developed it, University of Michigan and then in Ireland. Some groups have done this. And what it is, is the way they did it is they played sounds and they did shocks on your tongue at the same time. And believe it or not, this drives down tinnitus – why? It’s because what you’re doing essentially is teaching the brain that external sounds are verified with this other stimulation, this other stimulation on your, you know, on your skin or your tongue. But your internal sounds, your tinnitus, doesn’t get verified, it doesn’t lead to any kind of shock on your tongue. And so your brain learns the difference as a matter of brain plasticity learns the difference between external and internal sounds. So we decided to try this with, you know, on the skin, one of the audiologists on our medical board, Kevin Liebe, who’s just terrific. He said, Hey, why, you know, look at these papers, why don’t you try this with the wristband. So we tried it and it works perfectly. It works just as well. And by the way, I’ll just mention it’s, you know, it’s much cheaper and much easier to just ship the wristband to somebody at their house. They do this thing 10 minutes a day they listen to tones boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, they’re feeling it on their wrist. 10 minutes today is sufficient to drive tinnitus down. I should mention for clarity, it’s not it’s not a cure. It doesn’t. You know, none of our devices make tinnitus go away entirely. But as measured by the Tinnitus Functional Index, it drives it down by about a third, the aversive of the tinnitus and people find great value add is I mean that all the people, you know, we’ve got many thousands of customers using this right now. And they find it works for about 87% of people for about 13% of people it doesn’t we’re still exploring which flavors of tinnitus, it doesn’t work for, we don’t know. But just as a side note, what we’ve done as a company to account for that is we have a 30 day money back guarantee. So you try for 30 days if you don’t like it, you just send it right back to zero cost. So but what Yeah, so for the 87% of people for whom it works, they find this extremely valuable and super easy.

Brian Taylor 9:09
Well, and I think our audience many of them are hearing care professionals who deal with tinnitus patients all the time. So I’m sure they’re gonna be pleased to hear that there’s another option out there that’s got that kind of data to back it up. Where can people you have a website where can people learn or even order these products?

David Eagleman 9:26
Yeah, it’s Neosensory.com So Neosensory is the company and, and we’ve got all the information in the science and the papers and stuff on on the website. And by the way, I’ll mention so when you go to Neosensory you see two products. There’s the product Buzz for people with severe profound hearing loss, and there’s the tinnitus product, the Duo for tinnitus, but we have a third one that’s just about to come out, probably the end of this quarter. And that is for high frequency hearing loss. And so you know, as we know, as people get older, they’re losing their high frequencies, but the rest of their hearing is fine. And so we have spent about the last three years developing a killer solution for this. So what this required was developing entirely new things in machine learning and AI. What we have now is on the wristband, the wristband listens in real time for high frequency phonemes. So F’s and S’s and T’s and D’s and things like that. It listens in real time. And when it hears one, it buzzes a different motor in a different way. It says, Oh, I just heard an F, oh, I just heard of B, oh, I just heard an S. And what happens is, you know, your ear is taking care of all the low frequency stuff just fine. The wristband is clarifying, which were the high frequency phonemes. And your brain within about three weeks, can understand this completely in our, we’ve been running test subjects for about six months. They say that after three weeks, it’s like wearing a pair of eyeglasses on their wrists, and that they’re, you know, their spouses and their bosses and whatever, yell at them when they don’t wear the wristband and say, Hey, you’re not wearing the wristband today. So this is a killer solution for high-frequency hearing loss. Why because it’s cheaper than hearing aids. It’s, you know, it’s just something you wear on your wrist you’re not putting something on your head and and, you know, it hasn’t escaped our notice that, that some people don’t like wearing hearing aids, for example, my mother used to create it doesn’t like wearing it because it’s socially,

Brian Taylor 11:30
right. There’s a lot of stigma still involved with hearing aids and stuff.

David Eagleman 11:34
Exactly right. So this, you know, this wrist thing, it’s just like a fitness tracker. Nobody notices.

Brian Taylor 11:38
Unbelievable. It’s just the Clarify.

David Eagleman 11:41
Clarify. Yeah,

Called the Neosensory Clarify. And it’ll come out and about about two or three months from now.

Brian Taylor 11:47
Well, that’s going to be, I think a lot of people are going to take notice of that. That’s great, great information. One, I wanted to kind of pick your brain as a neuroscientist around the concept of acclimatization-neuroplasticity as it relates to hearing aids. So kind of want to go away from what we’ve been talking about just kind of as we move towards the end of our time together. I think it would be really valuable for our viewers who are primarily hearing care professionals to fit that fit hearing aids, if you could kind of get provide some insight in how long it takes an older person that say it was a moderate hearing loss to get acclimated to their hearing aids. What kind of insights would you want to share with professionals who routinely fit hearing aids on an older population?

David Eagleman 12:37
So hearing aids are a wonderful invention. I mean, they’ve you know, they’ve revolutionized so much in the world. But one of the problems is, for the most part, what they’re doing is just making sounds louder. And of course, you know, when you get older, your, the tuning of your cochlea gets muddier. And so what a lot of people experience is Okay, here’s some that’s louder and muddy. And so it’s not so much an issue of plasticity about getting used to hearing it’s although although it is, you know, it is, it’s getting used to, okay, how do I interpret the new sounds, but, instead, it’s just, hey, we’re gonna make this cochlea do some extra work, we’re gonna really pound the information in there. As opposed to with the wristband, for example, it really is a matter of brain plasticity, because you’re learning an entirely new signal. So with hearing aids, it’s slightly less of a issue of plasticity, the only the only sense in which brain plasticity is involved there is the the massive importance of people being out in the world and using their hearing aids. And, obviously, one of the things that happens that we all see is as people lose their hearing, sometimes their social lives shrink as a result, because it’s just, it’s less comfortable for them to be around a lot of speech. And, and the most important thing with hearing aids or the wristband or anything, is to be getting practice for your brain to be out there in the world, having the social pressure of understanding a conversation and getting the practice as a result of that.

Brian Taylor 14:13
Well then, thank you for that. Because I think that I’ll just add over the last 30 years I’ve fit a lot of hearing aids. And I think it’s good to hear that from a neuroscientist that it takes somebody that’s wearing them some time out in the environment to kind of get used to them. I think sometimes we lean too hard on the technology, thinking it’s going to solve all the problems when it’s really a matter of the person wearing them and kind of being dedicated for a period of time to get rewired, so to speak.

David Eagleman 14:40
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. By the way, this is one of the challenges we’re always facing, you know, both hearing aids and also with our wristbands, the thing for example, with the Clarify the fact that it takes three weeks before it’s really crystal clear. What we have to do is tell people, you know, look, here’s the you know, we’re going to gamify this we’re going to make these things we were in we keep track of your usage every day, we give you a little points and whatever, because it’s super important because otherwise people put it on for the first day, I think, yeah, I’m not getting anything out of it. And, yeah, so we need to know, with any technology, I think all of the insights from neuroscience and psychology and elsewhere and marketing, probably all the insights about gamification and making people stick with something are absolutely critical.

Brian Taylor 15:27
Well, it’s good to hear from somebody outside of our profession in audiology and hearing care. So thank you. As we wrap things up here, Professor Eagleman, I want to if you could maybe share again the name of the your website and the name of the tinnitus and the high frequency all of the stuff that you have I think people need to be reminded of all that

David Eagleman 15:47
great yeah, it’s called Neosensory as in new senses Neosensory.com, and the wristband for severe profound hearing loss or moderate. It’s called the Buzz. For tinnitus. It’s called the Duo – Neosensory Duo. And for the thing that we are going to release soon for high frequency hearing loss is called Neosensory Clarify.

Brian Taylor 16:08
Great. Well, I know you’re really busy guy, we’re happy to have you for even 20 minutes or so. So thanks again for your time, and maybe somewhere down the road we can catch up with you again.

David Eagleman 16:19
Terrific. Thank you, Brian. Terrific to talk to you