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An early Christmas present from our collaborators in:  an in-ear EEG system!.

Instead of measuring brain activity using electrodes placed on the scalp (e.g. see photo at the top of this page), we can now measure brain responses using these small hearing-aid like devices inserted into the ear  (3 electrodes in each ear canal).

We are very excited to try this out on our various paradigms.

If successful, this technology is set to revolutionize hearing aids, by enabling them to modulate their output, in real time, based on signals measured from the user's brain.

Team Chait-Bizley are working hard at the Ear Institue Christmas quiz.

...and they won (the very respectable) second place.

Read it

A demo of a simple (work-in-progress) auditory-based brain-computer interface machine created by (ENS, Paris) and (DTU, Denmark) as part of our . The short (pilot) clip  was filmed during a recent work visit to .

Soren is wearing an EEG cap which is recording his brain responses. He is listening to embedded in background audience noise. The device uses signals from Soren’s brain to suppress the background noise: The more intently Soren listens to Barak Obama’s voice, the clearer it becomes. In the video – the background noise is initially quite loud but as Soren concentrates on the speech, Pr. Obama’s voice becomes clearer (E.g. around 0.08’’). It then becomes noisy again as Soren withdraws his attention. Better quality video will be posted soon.

COCOHA aims to create a new generation of hearing aids that can be controlled based on the listeners’ brain signals. It is based on a collabraotion between our Lab with partners in , , and .

(They get the location of auditory cortex a bit wrong though....)

Selected media coverage of our recent J on 'inattentional deafness'

• AAAS
  
• (The comments are a gem!)

(VICE magazine asked us to comment. Read the article  )

We are on the screening panel for this year's

The Flame Challenge is an international competition where scientists answer the question in a way that is most appropriate for 11-year-olds. Entries are judged by thousands of 5th and 6th grade schoolchildren around the world.

Lefkothea's PhD thesis is titled: "Sensitivity to temporal structure in sound supports Auditory scene analysis - a psychophysics and MEG investigation".  She was examined by Prof , Maastricht University, and Prof. , UCL .

Congraulations to Sijia for winning the travel award.

students Oyinmiebi and Laura who have been interning at the Ear Institute these last two weeks under the supervision of Daniel Bates from our lab  and Katie Smith (Jagger Lab) are demonstrating their newly acquired, and very impressive, EEG prep skills.

Makoto Yoneya, an engineer from , is visiting the lab this summer. His visit is part of an ongoing collaboration with NTT, also supported by the Makoto's experiments use eye tracking to determine whether micro-saccades (very small eye movements) can be used to understand auditory attention.

The lab is out on the town, visiting the exhibit at the Hayward Gallery.

The giant (3 story!) slide.

Apparently,  world's most complicated clock.

Walking through a virtual forest:

upside down London:

is an experimental month long exhibition and events program that explores the interactions between art and science.  Our work is featured in the 'step 1' symposium which brings together scientists and creative practitioners to discuss possible 'entanglements' between science and art: " How can we use sound to affect one's experience of their surroundings?"

from Twitter:

We organized  a two day workshop on "Sensory Systems in Complex Environments" which brought together researchers (PIs and students) from UCL and Paris.

More details are :

The workshop was funded by a generous contribution from the and international offices. 

A few photos:

visits

Read about the seventh sense "Inaudible sounds" project:

Read the interview with Sijia on the BBC site:

24/01/2015: The COCOHA project - "Cognitive Steering of a Hearing Aid" is officially launched in Paris. Exciting 4 years ahead!

We were just awarded a PhD studentship by AoHL. The project is titled: "Evaluating hearing impaired listeners’ sensitivity to changes in dynamic, complex acoustic scenes - Implications for assessing auditory impairment and the benefit attained from a hearing aid". The position (with a starting date of September 2015) will be advertised soon. 

Chait lab (-flu victims+friends) at Christmas dinner 2014. Alas after we have eaten all the food!

• Our work on sensitivity to patterns in sound featured in  at the Arnolfini in Bristol (16/11/2014)
• UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences 'Meet the Researcher' project
• We have just been awarded a Royal Society International Exchange grant to support a new project with in Newcastle, Australia. (01/07/2014).
• Lucie Aman wins the MSc Student prize at the
• Two lab members: Lucie Aman and Anissa Bellahcen, participating in the