The eyes, it’s been said, are windows to the soul. I’d argue that the real portals are the ears.
 
Consider that, at this very moment, a cacophony of biological conversations is blasting through dime-size patches of skin just inside and outside the openings to your ear canals. There, blood is coursing through your veins, its pressure rising and falling as you react to stress and fun, its levels of oxygen switching in result to the air around you and the way your body is using the air you emit. Here we can also notice the electrical signals that zip through the cortex as it answers to the sensory information around us. And in that patch of skin itself, switching electrical conductivity signals moments of anticipation and emotional intensity.
 
The ear is like a biological equivalent of a USB port. It is unmatched not only as a point for “writing” to the brain, as happens when our earbuds transmit the sounds of our favored music, but also for “reading” from the brain. Soon, wearable devices that tuck into our ears—I call them hearables—will monitor our biological signals to expose when we are sentimentally exhausted and when our brains are remaining overtaxed. When we are striving to hear or comprehend, these gadgets will proactively help us focus on the sounds we wish to hear. They’ll also decrease the sounds that make us stress, and even connect to other devices around us, like thermostats and lighting controls, to let us feel more at ease in our surroundings. They will be a technology that is truly empathetic—a goal I have been working toward as chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories and an adjunct professor at Stanford University.
 
What might we look forward to from early offerings? Much of the expert research in hearables right now is paying attention on cognitive control of a hearing aid. The point is to distinguish where the sounds people are paying attention to are coming from—independently of the position of their heads or where their eyes are focused—and determine whether their brains are working unusually hard, most likely because they’re striving to hear someone. Today, hearing aids commonly just amplify all sounds, making them unpleasant for users in noisy environments. The most pricey hearing aids today do have some smarts—some use machine learning along with GPS mapping to determine which volume and noise reduction settings are best for a certain location, applying those when the wearer enters that area.
 
This kind of device will be appealing to pretty much all of us, not just people fighting with some point of hearing loss. The sounds and demands of our environments are continually changing and introducing assorted types of competing noise, reverberant acoustics, and attention distractors. A device that helps us create a “cone of silence” (remember the 1960s TV comedy “Get Smart”?) or gives us superhuman hearing and the ability to drive our attention to any point in a room will change how we communicate with one another and our environments.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com