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The Sound of Science
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
PROVIDENCE -- Seth Horowitz has super hearing. As a toddler, chicken pox invaded his ears, bursting both eardrums. When they healed, his hearing range had shifted higher. Today, he can hear a computer monitor humming three rooms away. He can hear bats chattering.
He also is an insomniac; any slight noise can jolt him awake. This might explain why Horowitz, an assistant research professor of neuroscience at Brown University, has spent years in search of a sound that can put people to sleep.
He thinks he's found it, along with a sound that makes you nervous, a sound that makes you concentrate, and a sound that makes you sick to your stomach. Now he and a partner, composer Lance Massey, are trying to market sounds as a way to combat insomnia and other maladies. They are developing CDs with sounds they believe can hijack the auditory system and use it to stimulate different parts of the brain.
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