Dr. Konstantina Stankovic

encoding high frequencies that are transmitting that information and so it all ties it together and really highlights how important it is to do fundamental research that is sometimes even curiosity driven to really lead to major advancements in terms of therapies for people and many times that

curiosity-driven research and its potential impact on therapies for humans is unknowable.

There are really strong ties and it's a very active area of research.

And like you said, hearing is such an essential sense and it's hypersensitivity and sensory hypersensitivity or dysfunction beyond hearing

can be a part of both mental health disorders as well as on the other end of the spectrum, developmental disorders.

And I think it really calls for, first of all, greater awareness.

And a part of what we are doing today is really bringing it up to the known because so many people are really stigmatized

Because you don't have a label on your forehead that you have hearing loss.

It's invisible.

And people are afraid to admit that they have hearing loss because they are concerned about how they'll be perceived.

And for a long time, it's been linked automatically to losing your marbles.

And it's a part of why people...

in a social situation where they don't hear and they are having a gathering with friends and then they're initially just nodding their head and then they feel isolated because they're just nodding their head and then they respond to what they think was said and then it turns out it was something completely tangential and then they decide, I don't even want to be a part of this anymore.

And that's how they become withdrawn and isolated, at least a part of the reason.

And similarly, if you are hypersensitive to everything around you, you want to avoid that kind of situation.

And I think we definitely need better education.

We need better ways to measure these things and quantify them.

We talked about tinnitus.

We don't really have a way to quantify tinnitus, to measure it.

precisely, objectively, in a robust fashion.