Hearing loss is one of the most prevalent health complaints in adults over the age of 60 and a major factor in speech comprehension difficulties. The goal for researchers at the Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts was to examine the effects of hearing ability on the brain processes supporting spoken language processing in adult humans.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to monitor activity in the brain while older adult subjects with normal-level hearing for their age listened to sentences that varied in the amount of linguistic comprehension needed to understand them...

Tinnitus, a relentless ringing in the ears that affects lovers of loud music, soldiers exposed to explosion noise and millions of others, is due to the under-inhibition of major neural pathways in the auditory center of the brain. According to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the connection between tinnitus and too little inhibition of brain auditory circuits was reported in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.