Hearing and Sound
I am a contributing editor at Scientific American and write the Brain Waves blog for Psychology Today (you can find those posts here). My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vogue and many other publications. Earlier in my career, I was on staff at Newsweek, and People, among other places and I’ve included a few of my old favorites from those days.
How the Pandemic Has Shaped Babies’ Development
The first two years of life are a time of astonishing brain growth. What has that meant for the toddlers who have only known a world with COVID? Two years is a long time in any child’s life. It’s half of high school and most of middle school, time…
Brain-Controlled Hearing Aids Could Cut through Crowd Noise
A prototype detects whom you are listening to and amplifies only that speaker’s voice; a potential solution to the “cocktail party problem”
Credit: Getty Images At a crowded party or a noisy restaurant, most of us do something that is remarkable. Out of all the voices surrounding us, our brains pick out the one we want to hear and focus on what that person has to say. People with hearing loss are not…
Behind the Scenes of our Senses: Part Two, Hearing
From a beep to Beethoven, hearing is a complex and remarkable process
I saw my neighbor on the street yesterday. She said “hello” and I said “hello.” No big deal? Wrong. Hello is a simple word and most of us say it and hear it many times each day. Yet each and every time, those two syllables—or even a simple “beep”—set off…
Behind the Scenes of Our Senses: Part One, Perception
Perceiving the world looks, sounds, and feels easy. It isn’t.
One of the best parts of reporting and writing about science is the gee whiz factor. As a regular part of my day, I stumble across facts and stories that make me say, “wow, I didn’t know that.” Sometimes I am surprised by how much of what I learn has…
4 Rules for Hanging on to What You Learn
One researcher’s search for the perfect amount of practice
My children were given math homework this summer in hopes of avoiding the infamous “brain drain.” That’s the tendency, between June and September, to lose a surprising amount of what they learned the previous school year. The other day, I finally sat down with the boys and made them start…
Raising a Deaf Child Makes the World Sound Different
When I found out my son couldn’t hear, I figured out I wasn’t really listening, either
Just before my youngest son Alex turned two, we discovered that he had significant hearing loss that was likely to get worse. A few weeks later, I found myself in the gym at the school my two older boys attended. I was there for the regular Friday morning assembly. I’d…