Dr. Michael Kilgard

The neurons become non-selective.

which means they now all respond to the same input.

If you're really narrow, you only respond to one little bit of the cochlea.

If you're broad, which happens after damage because you're trying to respond to something, now everybody responds to every wiggle and jiggle in the ear.

All these neurons are now amplifying that.

The brain is a massive amplifier, and you get feedback.

So what we're trying to do is narrow receptive fields and shift the map.

And this idea of diversity is something we didn't know about back in the day, the optimization and specificity idea.

We had a culture of find the thing and get the thing.

Now, mercifully, we're in a much more diverse idea.

We're learning that the training set matters.

Stimuli are likely to be more complicated.

The idea that we wanted specificity and we wanted treatments and neuroscience hasn't provided that, I'll take exception with that.

With phenocutinuria –

We have every baby born in this country gets a heel stick, and you measure the level of phenylalanine hydroxylase.

And if they don't have it, we put them on a special diet.

So they avoid phenylalanine, and they don't have severe mental retardation.

Problem solved.

And before, we just called everybody retarded.

And now we go, wait, there's many different ways.