Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, in collaboration with George Washington University, leveraged their understanding of auditory speech processing in the brain to enable volunteers to perceive speech through the sense of touch. This may aid in the design of novel sensory substitution devices swapping sound for touch, for example for hearing-impaired people. The findings appear in the Journal of Neuroscience on May 17, 2023.
Will Brown, who served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, was sleeping in his 15th-floor rental apartment on a fall 2022 night in Hawaii when he was jolted awake “screaming and shrieking “ in response to a “huge bang “ from an illegal aerial firework that immediately took him back to Kien Giang province in Vietnam.