Our prior work had shown that adult visual deprivation can change circuits in the auditory cortex. Now Peter shows that temporary visual deprivation in adults can improve functional hearing and even attenuate age related high-frequency hearing loss. Read more here in iScience.

Listening in complex sound environments requires rapid segregation of different sound sources, e.g., having a conversation with multiple speakers or other environmental sounds. Efficient processing requires fast (implicit) learning of inputs to adapt to target sounds and identify relevant information from past experiences. using naturalistic complex stimuli HiJee shows that subgroups of excitatory and inhibitory cells in auditory cortex (Actx) showed decreased responses, even in the input layers of ACtx, for re-occurring Target sounds, indicating that ACtx is involved in the early implicit learning phase for auditory memory. Read more here in Progress in Neurobiology.