Sound, Brain and the Science of Hearing with Neuroscientist Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
about the episode
What if some forms of hearing loss do not appear on current hearing tests at all?
In this episode of Innovate & Elevate, Sharon Kedar sits down with neuroscientist, engineer, musician, and Carnegie Mellon Dean Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham to explore how the brain processes sound and why hearing is far more complex than simply detecting noise.
Together, they discuss hidden hearing loss, the “cocktail party effect,” ADHD and sound filtering, cognitive fatigue, aging, sensory processing, and the emerging science behind sound, music, and the brain.
This Episode Is For You If:
- You’re interested in ADHD, sensory processing, and cognitive load
- You want to understand how the brain filters sound
- You’re curious about the future of hearing diagnostics and neuroscience
Jessica Federer
About dr. barbara shinn-cunningham
Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham is a neuroscientist, engineer, musician, and Dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on how the brain processes sound, attention, hearing, and sensory perception in complex environments.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Episode Outline
(00:00) Introduction to hearing and brain processing
(03:12) Why identical twins can experience sound differently
(06:25) Loud concerts, noise exposure, and hidden hearing loss
(11:08) Why hearing tests may miss subtle hearing damage
(16:10) Hypersensitivity, sound amplification, and aging
(21:22) ADHD, focus, and filtering sound
(27:40) The “cocktail party effect” explained
(34:18) Why hearing loss can feel mentally exhausting
(42:55) ADHD as a potential superpower
(52:11) Sound baths, sleep, and the neuroscience of sound
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Sharon Kedar CFA: I am so excited to welcome the brilliant Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, neuroscientist, engineer, and musician, who serves as the Dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon. Her research advances our understanding of how sound is processed in the human brain. I am a little nervous to interview you today because I just think the world of you and your research and who you are as a human, just everything.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: So thank you for joining today.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Well, Sharon, it's such a pleasure to be here, and I feel the same way.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: I'm just gonna jump right in because I think that the listeners and viewers are gonna be absolutely fascinated. We know so much less than you do about how our brains process sound. First we wanna unpack how we hear a sound. Why can different people perceive the same sound so differently?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: That's a great question. When we hear, you think it's just the ear, but it's not just the ear; it's the brain and the ear working together. And you can have differences in hearing. People have hearing loss or different states of the ear itself. But beyond that, there's differences in the brain.
Some people have different sensitivity to sound or different ways of suppressing things that they're trying to ignore. And so those all work together to lead to all sorts of differences in what we perceive. And sometimes it's also the settings. That sound that might be, you know, really annoying in one setting, you might not even notice in another setting.
It's about your state and what you're paying attention to in the brain, but also what's getting to the ear and how well that's represented. So all of those things work together to change how people perceive.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: In the control study that I've done with my identical twin. The data on the table is I'm left-handed, she's right-handed. I feel like I'm much more sound sensitive than she is. Does that even make sense?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: No, it absolutely makes sense. So different people do have different sensitivity and even though you're identical twins, you've lived different lives, you've had different experiences. That experience has changed how your brain processes things, how it represents things, so it could be that. But it also can change how your ears are responding to sound because sadly, the longer you live, the more noise exposure you have, the worse your hearing might be, and that can cause subtle differences.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Here is my unproven theory. As kids we went to a lot of large high volume concerts. So I made a list before the interview that before I was 20, I went to the Rolling Stones, that was not quiet. REM, Bobby Brown, Garth Brooks, Madonna, Billy Joel, Elton John, and a few others.
Do you think that's the reason? I'm like, "She didn't go to as many concerts."
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Oh my gosh. So first of all, you have such fun taste and such eclectic taste. I'm kind of jealous. I went to Barry Manilow. Like, I think you win. No, there's a huge difference with noise exposure. When you go to those really loud concerts, you're having a great time.
When you leave the concert when it's been really loud, it may almost feel like you have cotton in your ears. It feels like you're not quite hearing as well right after the concert, but it gets better over a day or two, and you don't think again about it. But that kind of fuzziness that you experience after a really loud exposed kind of event, that has probably caused damage, and it causes temporary shifts in what quiet sounds you might be able to even hear.
So if somebody tested you, an audiologist tested you right after one of those concerts, you probably didn't have normal hearing thresholds. If they tested you a couple days later, you might. The ear seems to have recovered. But one of the things that's really fascinating is from animal studies and now human studies, we now know that that temporary threshold shift, the ear recovers as best that it can, and it doesn't appear on a hearing test in the audiology clinic that it's abnormal.
But what happens is some of the fibers coming out of the ear no longer are there. They die off, and so your hearing becomes less precise. Let me actually back up. When you go to the audiologist, what are they testing? They're testing at each sound frequency from low to high frequencies whether you can detect a sound at a certain level, and what level does it have to be for you to hear it, for you to detect that it's there.
But imagine if you went to-- I'm wearing glasses 'cause I'm looking at a screen. I take off my glasses, and everything's kind of blurry, and the details aren't there. I can still see that you're present. I just don't make out your face as well, and that's kind of what the audiologist is testing. Can you see that Sharon is there?
Well, yeah, but I don't see her clearly. So that's exactly what happens when you don't have as many nerve fibers representing sound. The sound isn't as clear, and that really can make it hard, especially when there's other things going on, like if you're talking one-on-one like we are, and there's not a lot of sound in the background, you're probably fine.
But when you have that subtle damage that doesn't show up in current audiological tests, it's really because the sound isn't clear enough, and that's fine in quiet, but the minute there's other sounds in the background, suddenly you start to fall apart.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: It's unbelievable how hearing tests are normal, but yet you've actually unpacked the... it's not even subclinical. It's just a different way to look at hearing.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yeah, this has been something that has been studied probably for the last 15 years. Only about 15 years ago, 20 years ago did people realize that temporary threshold shifts that go back to normal were all good. No, that's not what's really going on.
We still don't have good clinical tests. We know that it's a problem, and people in academia, in the lab, are trying to figure out what would be a really good test that we could deploy in the clinic to reveal this.
It is interesting now, when I go to a concert now, the first thing I bring is my earplugs.
Yep. We all should have done that when we were young and felt invincible. Unfortunately, we only realize it when we're starting to already be middle-aged and have hearing loss that we notice. Then that's when you start taking precautions, but it's kind of already too late, sadly.
And the other thing, I don't know if it'll make you feel better or worse, but there's natural aging where the same thing that happens when you have hearing noise exposure, the same thing happens just from normal aging. So noise exposure accelerates what would go on naturally anyhow.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Yeah, exactly. What causes hypersensitivity, and is it always a bad thing?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: So it depends on what's causing it. There can be different causes. When you have hearing loss, one of the things that happens is you can end up with hypersensitivity, which seems counterintuitive. But when you have hearing loss, the system boosts internally. The brain's trying really hard, the system's trying really hard to make do with less input.
And so it can adapt and change how much signal gets into the brain for the same amount of sound, which is great when sound is quiet, but it makes you intolerant of louder sounds. So suddenly a little bit of hearing loss and the brain's like, "I got this. No worries. I'm just gonna turn up the gain and let things through better."
That's great in quiet, but then you go to the loud setting and it's exhausting and tiring and your brain's trying to work to turn off the sound, and it's actually effortful and exhausting. So that can be one source of hypersensitivity. But there are actually other things where some people who are not neurotypical can have differences in how the brain's organizing sound that makes it hard to suppress sound.
For instance, a lot of people with autism are hypersensitive. Not just sound, but to touch, to taste, and it really has to do with their brain and how their brain is connecting to sensory inputs. And a typical person processes things that are important and, what might consider important, more than things that are boring and dull.
But some neuro - atypical people process everything more equally. They don't give the same kind of emotional weight to things that are really, really important versus the feeling of the fabric on my body might be something I can't ignore if I have a circuitry in the brain that's a little different than typical.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: That is so fascinating. I heard two things. One is if you have hearing loss or damage, you actually hear the world louder 'cause you're working so hard in noisy settings. It's like more exertional and it's louder. Is that right?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: So to be super precise like a scientist, loudness is the subjective thing. There can be a sound level, which is a physical property of sound, and loudness is, how do I rate it? How much does it sound intense or not? And what happens is with hearing loss, the brain does literally amplifies the signals that are getting to the ear a little bit because they're weak because of the hearing loss.
And so the brain may amplify it, and that's okay at low sound levels, but now there's the upper limit of what feels comfortable doesn't change, and everything gets bumped up, and the thing that was comfortably loud without hearing loss suddenly is louder than that internally, and now it's uncomfortable.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Can we control it? So a lot of times you hear like our parents or just couples where it's like one person is really tuned in to the volume of the other... or even siblings, like this person's so loud. Can we train ourselves to tune in or out certain people or sounds?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: I have some friends who once published a study that was all about how you can ignore your spouse better than people you don't know. They were tongue in cheek, but there's a whole series of studies that have been done on familiarity, and when you're familiar with a voice, your brain knows what to expect.
It knows what the tone of the voice is gonna be. That ability to predict that familiarity makes you better at honing in on that voice, especially in noisy settings. But there's kind of a flip side to that, which is - I get really engrossed in something, my husband says something to me, I don't even notice he's talking to me.
When we were first married, it used to annoy him, and then I became an auditory neuroscientist, and I was like, "Honey, it's not my fault." Like, my brain is so focused, I'm attending to this thing, and the rest of the world has been shut down a little bit. And so when your kid is ignoring you because they're engrossed in their phone or reading a book, and you're right next to them talking to them, and they don't respond, it's probably not that they're ignoring you intentionally.
It's that they're so focused that the brain is ... The brain, the central part, is not even letting the sound in, and you can see it. You can see it in neuroscience studies that when somebody's really focused on one thing, other sensory inputs that are completely audible, they don't even get to the brain.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Wait, I'm laughing because I had one of my kids tested at Children's National 'cause I was sure when they were small that they had a hearing issue and it's exactly what you just said.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yeah.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: When they said the kid was normal, I was like, "Can you retest?"
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: You should be proud because that child has a really strong brain, literally. There are differences in how well people can ignore things. And when somebody's really good at focusing, that's a superpower. I mean, it can be bad, but it's also a superpower in a lot of situations.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: So in terms of real world awareness, one of the things that you've talked about for years, what is the cocktail party effect?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yeah. The cocktail party effect is you're at a setting like a cocktail party where there's lots of things going on, and what the brain has to do to make sense of the voice you're trying to pay attention to is it turns off. It doesn't let through. It filters out all the other things, and you can actually see this in the brain response.
So I can put electrodes on my scalp, and when somebody's talking to me, the electrodes on my scalp, the signals will follow their voice. You can actually correlate what the person is saying with what you see on the scalp coming out the electrical activity out of the brain. When there are two people talking and I'm paying attention to one and ignoring the other, the thing that the brain responds to, the thing that the brain is representing, is the person I'm attending, and the person that I'm ignoring, it's not even present in the brain.
It's there at the ear. It's there coming out of the ear into the brain but the brain tunes it out, filters it out. And when we talked about how hard it is in a noisy restaurant? I have terrible trouble in a noisy restaurant now. And it feels like if I'm hearing anything, I'm hearing everything.
I can't filter things anymore, and that has to do with failures of being able to filter that come from the representation being fuzzy. Imagine trying to read or make fine details out on a picture when you're not wearing glasses. You can't pull things apart and filter out and pay attention only to the thing that matters.
That's what happens when you have hearing loss. When it's noisy in a loud restaurant, you're hearing everything, and people with hearing impairment who get hearing aids, even the best hearing aids today don't really help.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: That's what I was gonna ask you about that. In today's world, we do have earbuds that so many people wear. What's your perspective on why the technology hasn't gotten to the point... we would have thought that you could go in with a wearable and almost have, in my head, it's like, okay, here's the 10 people who are gonna be at the dinner. Here's who I wanna turn down and here's who I wanna turn up.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yep. I was once at a cocktail party literally where I got stuck talking to a guy. It was not the most interesting thing in the world, but my hearing was good back then, and I listened instead. I nodded at all the right times, but what I was really listening to was a really juicy bit of gossip going on next to me. So it would be great to have a hearable that could separate out the man's voice from the people next to me, and then present to me what's most interesting. But part of the problem is being able to know what that is. 10 years ago, we couldn't take with machines a mixture of different voices and reproduce the man and the women separately.
We just didn't have the technology. Machine learning now makes that problem solved. So now we can give a device a mixture of sounds that you would hear at the ear of all the things going on in the world, and it can separate them for you. But now how do you decide? How do you decide what's the important thing?
In that example where I'm facing somebody who I'm really not interested in what they're saying because something better is going on next to me, but I'm socially stuck talking to him, in that situation, I'm facing this way, so it's not where I'm facing. I'm looking at him because I have to because that's the socially acceptable thing to do.
How do I know what it is that the person's trying to listen to? You have to have information about what the brain's trying to do, or at least that's where people are heading.
One of the things that our hearing is evolved to do is keep us aware of everything. Like, we only are paying attention closely to Sharon right now, but if something unexpected happened behind me, my brain would react to that.
If the door slammed or somebody dropped a glass behind me, I would hear it and respond to it despite being locked in on you right now. And that's different than the eyes. Like, my eyes are only telling me what's going on in front. So the sound around me, that awareness of my environment is really, really an important function of what hearing does normally.
And so filtering out everything except the thing you thought before you went to the party was gonna be the fun thing to listen to, not the right answer. And filtering everything out and only staying on the voice that AI thinks is the most important thing right now, probably not the right answer because you're still not gonna be aware of the background And so it's a complicated human factors problem.
People like hearing scientists working alongside people in machine learning, honestly, 'cause that's... It's so complex, you need that kind of pattern recognition to make sense of the world, but you need them all working together with somebody who's an expert in human factors and higher level problems to put together a device like that.
And you can't just make everything loud because that just doesn't solve the cocktail party problem. Everything would still just be blurry.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Yeah, I find it hard when that situation happens and there's loud and soft voices. It's hard to blend those and to hear them.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yeah.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: It feels like it's hearing gymnastics when you're...
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Exactly. Well, the brain is a huge consumer of energy. It is just using up energy all the time. It's using up more energy than you'd imagine, and these processes of focusing on one thing and ignoring something else actually uses significant energy.
And if I have hearing loss and I'm trying to focus on one thing, it takes more effort. It literally is eating up more calories, more is burning in my brain to focus. And so what actually happens is it's exhausting. When you start to have hearing loss, it's exhausting.
Even if you can hear everything, your brain is working harder. It's working with noisier signals. You fill in things based on what you're expecting to hear. It's just we're making guesses about what the world is 'cause it's so noisy.
If I have a noisy representation to start with 'cause I've got hearing loss, the brain's filling in more details for me, working to try and guess better, and it just uses more energy. So that's a long-winded way of saying people with hearing loss, they go into a party, they might be okay for a half an hour, and then they have to go.
They can't cope anymore.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: It's a fascinating reality. Does that basically mean, in terms of where we are today, that anyone with that issue, it's helpful for them to know? 'Cause otherwise they might be like, "Why am I so exhausted?" Or is there even more coming in terms of how we can help those people?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Any audiologist will counsel somebody if they find that you have hearing loss. If they're giving you a hearing device, they'll counsel you. They'll explain. They'll even tell you, like if you go to a noisy restaurant, sit in a booth in the corner, ' cause then there's only sound coming from one side that you have to ignore, and that's less effortful.
There's strategies that people can adopt to try and make things easy. So it's really well known, but again, it goes back to what can we do?
And the answer is right now not a whole lot. And one of the things that's really scary is people, as they get more and more hearing loss, they start to self-isolate because there are fewer and fewer social settings that they can tolerate without just being wiped out.
And that has been correlated with faster progression of dementia because these people are people that might have otherwise been really engaged, you know, and been mentally engaged with the world around them, and suddenly they're sitting at home watching the TV alone because that's all they can cope with.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: With that is so interesting and I think awareness is a key factor. What's doubly interesting is when you were talking, there's the whole host of people who go to the doctor, and because we can't get to their auditory specific issue, you're told you're normal, you go home ...
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: You know it's worse now than it was when you were 20. You know that.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: But I guess those people just need to know that there's a chunk of folks who fall into this, you know, diagnostics have not caught up with their hearing loss, might be the right way to say it.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Well, and there are hearing tests that can get at it a little bit that some audiologists use. It's funny, the typical person who goes to the audiologist, typically it's a middle-aged person. It's a person who's starting to have these subtle losses.
They don't quite show up, but they know it's harder. They can't tolerate the noisy restaurant. They can't go to the rock concert and be happy. And so it's affecting them a little bit, and they go to the doctor, and the audiologist says, "Yeah, your hearing thresholds are normal." And they used to just say, "Well, yeah, we don't really understand."
Now people do understand. The audiologists do know that probably what's going on is a subtle loss that's just not showing up in a standard test.
I have a really good friend back when I was in Boston at Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary. She's a world expert on the clinical side of all of this.
When she started explaining to patients what was really happening, that they weren't crazy, it wasn't their brain, it really was their ear, 'cause a lot of people are like, "I must be losing my mental capacity 'cause I can't cope with the world the same way." When she was able to explain to them it's a hearing problem, not a brain problem, it's just your ears, that's a relief to a lot of people.
She would get emails thanking her for explaining what was going on. So knowing what the problem is and being able to counsel people is a huge help.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: One of the things that you said that really caught my attention, so when I first met you, you openly introduced yourself as having ADHD.
Can you talk about your perspective? ' I think this is the first time that I'll share that I was diagnosed in my 40s after one of my kids was diagnosed.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Well, that's exactly how I realized first. One of our sons in grade school was tested, and there was a questionnaire, and I went through the questionnaire, and he was not quite ADHD. He was on the edge. I was. And I still discover certain things that I do or habits that I have that are really consistent with ADHD.
Some people have ADHD to the point that it interferes with their functioning. Mine is, for me, actually I think a superpower, especially in my role as dean. My day as dean, every half hour generally is a new meeting on a new topic, and my brain is just so happy to just be like, "New idea, new idea.
Switch, switch, switch." That's what my brain thrives on. When it comes to hearing, I typically work with rock music or pop music or talk radio going on in the background. That's where I'm in my best zone because my brain is just occupied enough to let me focus on what I'm trying to accomplish. But I think especially for my role as a scientist, there is a superpower around ADHD when it's the level that I have, and that is, I'm able to bring together ideas that some people that are kind of isolated. And there's a creativity to this jumble of ideas mixing around in my head in ways that they might not for other people who kind of compartmentalize ideas more.
And I think that's actually informed the science that I do. I trained as an engineer. I thought I was gonna be a computer engineer. I went to grad school, and I'm a musician and realized that there are people from engineering studying the sense of hearing, and that jumbled these two worlds together.
And so I bring engineering concepts and hearing concepts together. I really care about music because I'm a musician, and I bring my experience as a musician into the work that I do. And when I talk to somebody from a different field, I grab ideas from their field and see how they might apply to my field, and that's part of the symptom of just seeing the world and taking in information more than somebody who's focused really on one thing all the time or has a more typical approach to information flow.
So I think when it comes to hearing, ADHD is really interesting. One of my students who was diagnosed with ADHD and I did a study together where we brought in people with ADHD, and we looked at when something unexpected happens, when a sound happens that somebody's trying to ignore, what happens with ADHD? And it turned out the ADHD brain literally let through more of that sound that you're trying to ignore.
I talked about how you filter out sound. The ADHD brain didn't filter it out as well. But that can be a really useful thing sometimes. So it's a really terrible thing if you're trying to have your child sit in a quiet classroom and listen to the teacher in a grade school. It's not an appropriate behavior to, like, be noticing all the other things going on and wanting to squirm.
But in the real world, ADHD is not so bad. It's more that the school systems need us to be in line and quiet, and that's not how many ADHD people feel comfortable.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: That's so interesting. My experience and observation is that there is, I feel like, a zone that some ADHD folks get into where they're so hyper-focused that they can actually tune everything out, but that's not sort of the baseline.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: And different people with different levels of ADHD exhibit one of those behaviors differently. Like, some people hyperfocus a lot. I tend to hyperfocus also. But at the same time, I only do that well when there's enough background stuff going on to entertain my brain almost, which is why I work so well when music's on.
And it's really funny. The person in the office next to me now is wearing noise-canceling headphones because they are the opposite. They can't work with any sound, and I'm just like wanna hear music playing. So I have to remember to put my earbuds in and not disturb them,
Sharon Kedar, CFA: I love that. Okay, so how many people meanwhile do we think are gonna listen who probably have ADHD and weren't diagnosed? That's the other fascinating piece about this. There's probably so many people.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yeah. I have no idea. I mean, I only know from my personal experience, and I'm self-diagnosed just based on these criteria that are published. And I'm not really sure that it changed much about how I approach life. But it's like a lot of things.
Like, if you don't realize that what you're feeling or what you're being chastised for is just part of how you're wired, there can be shame and unhappiness coming from that. And so, you know, for a lot of people, that diagnosis may really help. I managed to do well enough in school and other things that it didn't ever cause me grief.
And so by the time I realized it, I was an accomplished adult, and I was like, "Huh, that's kind of interesting."
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Yeah. I love that about you. It's such a great testament to the power of ADHD. Okay, so just in the interest of asking a couple questions about how we can use sound, is there a way to use sound and music as therapy?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Yeah, absolutely. Sound drives the brain. Sound changes what your brain is doing, and when you're focused on sound, it ties really, really closely to emotional centers in the brain. It ties really closely just in, in terms of the wiring of the brain, it ties really closely to movement.
And there's a lot of therapies that people use that are often music therapies especially. A lot of that is more clinical work than the neuroscience of it. There are some people studying why that's happening, what the mechanisms are, but not a lot. And actually, I'm about to start a study with a woman from the College of Fine Arts who's a violinist and who gives sound baths.
It's kind of fun for me 'cause it's a project that is so far away from kind of the hardcore neuroscience that I normally do. We're gonna be taking people and putting them in the sound bath and measuring their brain before and after and during the sound bath to see what happens.
And I experienced one of her sound baths, and for my ADHD brain at least, she's so good at grabbing my brain just enough that all I'm thinking about is the sound and nothing else, and it's so relaxing and so freeing. We don't know what the mechanisms are specifically. Maybe it's just being in the quiet room.
I don't believe that. Maybe it's being in a quiet room and lying in a big beanbag chair, which is how she does these things. That's certainly part of it, but we're gonna do control groups that are experiencing pieces of the sound bath but not the actual sound and trying to look at what is it about the sound? What are the properties of the sound that make it so relaxing and so compelling and get people into this relaxed state so rapidly.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: That is on my bucket list. I signed up for a sound bath next month, actually.
It's actually in a pool where they have these floats, so obviously that's multi-sensory. But I wonder if one can do a sound bath just, like, at night in their house, or whether there's something to going there.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: This colleague of mine, she has a studio, and you come in and lie down on this beanbag chair that envelops your body, and she plays these sounds, and it's all around you and an all-encompassing. And so I think that getting your body into a relaxed state is obviously gonna help, but there is something really, I found, compelling around the sound itself.
And it, it's not quite steady sound. It's kind of modulated at rates that I know as a neuroscientist are rates the brain really likes. Like will latch onto, and so I think there's a real art to it that probably is making use of without understanding, you know... the practitioners know this works, but they don't know the neuroscience.
But I think they've found what works really well to grab the brain, to really drive the brain so that other sounds, other thoughts don't intrude, which is what allows you to relax. That's the hypothesis we're going in with. I can come back in a year and maybe tell you whether that's true or not.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: That sounds amazing. I would love to be in that sound bath. What about sound for sleep?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Absolutely, and this goes back to what is relaxing for me is annoying to the person in the office next to me. Some people really have trouble if there's distracting sounds going on, and blocking sounds are really helpful, like relaxing wave sounds. Sounds that are kind of like a sound bath. The sounds that are often the sounds that people play to sleep well are sounds that have a little bit of change through time, but not a lot.
It's just enough to, like, hijack the brain and have the brain stay engaged, but not enough to have it have meaning, and that's kind of the key thing, I think, is that if sound is steady, just a noise going on, the brain actually stops responding to it. But if it's changing a little bit through time, like lapping waves or rainfall, there's just enough structure in the sound that the brain doesn't quite stop responding to it, and it keeps the brain engaged and covers up other things that might intrude.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Fascinating. Does that include binaural?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: What happens is people play sound where the timing between the ears changes from leading in the right ear, making it sound like it's far to the right, to leading in the left ear, so it sounds like it's on the left.
And it sounds like the sound's moving left and right, but there's nothing magical about I mean, it may get people to focus on that sound rather than other things 'cause it's changing in this way, that if they focus on it, may keep other things from intruding. But I mean, it's like one of these things that gets talked about in the popular press, but there's nothing magical about it. It's just the brain is really sensitive to left versus right, and you can make that be a feature of the sound that you change. And like anything that is changing just enough but isn't all that interesting otherwise, it can help you relax.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: Okay. Well, that is so interesting. I have one last question with a huge thank you. So I have been asked to ask you this. If the eyes are the window to our souls, what are our ears?
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: Wow. I think the ears are the doorway. They're the doorway to communication because it's sound that allows you and me to be talking right now. It's sound that allows us to share ideas in a natural, quick way, and so I'd say ears are the doorway to the visual window.
Sharon Kedar, CFA: I love it. Well, thank you, Dr. Shinn-Cunningham. It is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Dr. Barb Shinn-Cunningham: It has been such a fun time chatting with you, Sharon. Thank you so much.
Additional Resources
Carnegie Mellon University — https://www.cmu.edu
Mellon College of Science — https://www.cmu.edu/mcs/
Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary — https://masseyeandear.org
Children’s National Hospital — https://www.childrensnational.org
About Your Host
Sharon Kedar, CFA, is Co-Founder of Northpond Ventures. Northpond is a multi-billion-dollar science-driven venture capital firm with a portfolio of 60+ companies, along with key academic partnerships at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, MIT’s School of Engineering, and Stanford School of Medicine. Prior to Northpond, Sharon spent 15 years at Sands Capital, where she became their first Chief Financial Officer. Assets under management grew from $1.5 billion to $50 billion over her tenure, achieving more than 30x growth. Sharon is the co-author of two personal finance books for women. Sharon has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a B.A. in Economics from Rice University, and is a CFA charterholder. She lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband, Greg, and their three kids.
CONNECT WITH SHARON
Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn: Sharon Kedar
Follow with Sharon on Instagram: @sharonkedarcfa
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FAQs
Why do I struggle to hear in noisy restaurants even if my hearing test is normal?
This episode of Innovate & Elevate explains how some forms of hearing loss may not appear on standard hearing tests, even though the brain struggles to process sound clearly in noisy environments.
What is hidden hearing loss?
Hidden hearing loss refers to subtle auditory damage that affects sound clarity and processing but may not appear on traditional hearing exams.
What is the cocktail party effect?
The cocktail party effect is the brain’s ability to focus on one voice while filtering out background noise in busy environments.
Can loud concerts permanently damage hearing?
Yes. Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham explains that repeated loud noise exposure may damage auditory nerve fibers even if hearing later appears “normal.”
Why does hearing loss feel exhausting?
The brain uses more energy trying to process unclear sound signals, especially in noisy settings.
How does ADHD affect sound processing?
The episode explores how ADHD brains may filter sensory information differently, allowing more sound and environmental input through.