sethshorowitz

My absolute favorite experiment was one that sadly never got published due to a lot of factors but I still hope to carry it out one day. I've always loved working with bats and got interested early on in how they balance while flying at 30 mph (and eating and dogfighting) in total darkness. I published a basic paper on how they use their echolocation to calibrate their vestibular (balance) system the way we use our eyes and priorioception but it focused on echolocation more than balance. The next step though was trying to figure out which way their heads aimed when they were flying. IR cameras (which we used for flight work) tend to have lousy resolution and relatively low frame rates. So I realized if we could mount a tiny laser on their heads with a crosshair pattern lens, we could figure out exactly where their heads were pointing and reconstruct their vestibular function by combining body position and head aim. So I (and the engineer who was one of my favorite people) used a 3D printer to make tiny backpacks, disassembled some laser pointers, attached rechargeable lithium ion batteries and weighed the whole mess. 4 grams. bats can easily lift half their body weight (big born bats weight about 18 grams), so I stuck it to them using toupee tape and was able to get normal flight behavior with a red crosshair skittering across the walls showing where their heads were aiming. tl;dr - bats with frikkin' lasers on their heads. And I got to use that as a title for my presentation at NASA.

You're describing misophonia and it's not that uncommon, but when you mentioned your service record, well it's even more common. PTSD (which is sometimes treated with adderall) and other mindstates that have a high level of arousal shift your attentional threshold, making you more prone to startling, even if familiar environments. I had a luckily brief run in with it a decade ago after a very bad experience with search and rescue and found that even if I didn't show the classic startle behavior, almost every sound grabbed my attention and it drove me crazier (as well as severely impacted my sleep).

Two suggestions. First go and get a comprehensive hearing and vestibular function test. A REALLY comprehensive one. A lot of military personnel suffered subclinical hearing and vestibular damage. Your brain will often try and overcompensate for a damaged area in your hearing (which is the basis for some forms of tinnitus) and hence up the gain, making normal sounds seem uncomfortably loud. But subclinical damage to the other half of your inner ear, the vestibular part, can be an underlying cause of many PTSD symptoms including emotional responses to events. The vestibular system is deeply tied to basic emotional and arousal areas of the brain (think fear of falling, panic attacks linking to vertigo, the high of a high speed motorcycle ride or base jumping). Since you don't regenerate hair cells in either part of your ear, these symptoms can last a lifetime and of course get worse as we naturally lose high end hearing as we age.

Next, after you get your exams (or even before) check out misophonia support groups and see if you can get a referral to a local physician/audiologist who works with the condition. http://misophonia.com/ isn't bad although some of the links for resources they provide are a bit fluffy IMHO. Hope this helps.

How much time do you have? I'm actually devoting a chapter on it in my next book (if the publisher decides to bite). True synaesthesia is relatively rare, although you’d never know if from reading popular accounts especially given the highly variable diagnostic criteria used. The short version is that it’s an involuntary and automatic condition where one sense bleeds into another in a highly spatially selective way, assigning sound to color or colors to text, often with exaggerated memory and emotional responses. Neurological and genetic hypotheses abound, including reduced inhibitory responses in areas responsible for sensory processing, global changes in areas responsible for sensory integration, and even rather fluffy supposed relationships with mental illness or autism. However, categorization of synaesthesia as a diagnosis rather than as part of normal brain variation may be more of a cultural artifact of our love for labels. What’s telling is looking at who gets diagnosed as a synaesthete – David Hockney, Vassily Kandisnky, Itzhak Perlman, Richard Feynman, and Nicola Tesla – artists, musicians and scientists with high levels of experimentalism and creativity. Are their brains actually different? Or are they just people whose brains mix sensation, attention and memory at the farther end of the normal spectrum?

According to the textbooks, our senses are supposed to respond in a very specific way to stimulation, following the “laws of specific energy.” Photoreceptors respond to photons, the ear’s inner hair cells respond to pressure waves, the olfactory epithelium and taste receptors respond to chemicals, touch receptors respond to pressure (or hot or cold) and the vestibular sense responds to acceleration of the head. The problem is it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how you can trick one sense to respond to a different type of input. Close your eyes in a dark room and press (gently please) on your eyeballs. You’ll see a series of concentric arcs or rings, usually in an odd afterimage-like purple-green or yellow. So you just saw something based on pressure, something you’re only supposed to do by light. Or go into a club, somewhere where the bass throbs and the beat makes you move. Why are you moving to the beat even if you’re not a dancing fool? Because loud, low frequency sounds can shake the tiny organs in the vestibular part of your ear. Even though it’s sound, it can trigger vestibular reflexes that help you stabilize your body against the pull of gravity, making you tap your feet or at least shift your body side to side.

At some level we are all synaesthetes; we talk about tone “color,” describe musical pitches spatially as “up or down,” and describe things we don’t like by saying it “stinks” or “leaves a bad taste” in our mouths.  But those who take it to an extreme, transitioning from metaphor to simile, may be people who use the connectivity between the senses, attention and memory in different ways, yielding intellectual and artistic creativity.  

Binaural beats are a fascinating phenomenon and studies have shown that they can be picked up all the way through the cortex, even though they are a virtual phenomenon (decent paper here - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741401/). Howevre, what I found with years of playing with them is that simple binaural beats don't have much psychological effect unless there is a lot of expectation by the user. I developed a technique with my sound design company for making spectrally rich binaurally beats (basically you create a music or sound track limited to under 3 kHz, which is about the upper limit for the temporal comparison and encoding in the superior olive that triggers binaural beats, and then do a sliding shift of the other channel to separate the frequencies in the two ears by the beat frequency. It seems to grab a lot more cortical processing and I've used it in sleep induction algorithms that are being used commercially.

Okay, simpler (sorry - my bad for still talking like a professor) - binaural beats are generated by your brain trying to take two frequencies presented to each ear that are too close to distinguish and turn them into a single thing. That thing is a sound that wobbles or gets louder and softer at the difference between the two tones in each ear. The rate at which the beating occurs is encoded throughout the brain, but single beats don't do much unless you'r really wanting them to. But there are ways to use complex sounds to get that beating rate to grab a lot of your brain and change its behavior.