Dr Mounya Elhilali did the keynote talk at the NER Neural Engineering conference in Baltimore in 2023. I was able to sit down with her and talk to learn more about her auditory processing selectivity research.

Top 3 Takeaways:

•  Nurses especially can get used to beeping and alarms which can be dangerous for patients.
• "Under anesthesia, you see some basic responses, but they are different than when you engage the, let's say, an animal in an awake state, and then when they are awake and actually behaving and engaging with the system"
• Audio recordings can be tuned to remove ambient noise but they need to be perfectly calibrated to distances between microphones.

0:45 "Do you want to describe your work a little bit?"

3:00 Can you talk about the Cocktail Party Problem?

4:30 How are alarms and beeping override our attention

8:30 How do you gather your data, what kinds of devices?

10:00 What is the role of awake vs non-awake states in auditory processing?

11:15 How did you get into this?

13:00 How are you involved in the translation of the science?

16:15 Why are recordings harder to hear than in real life?

17:15 Is there anything we didn't talk about?