Transcriber: Ian Brown Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
What you see in the image before you
is an actress who’s just won a celebrity dance competition.
But, perhaps what you don’t see
is the remarkably resilient brain that led her to that win.
The actress I’m talking about is Rose Ayling-Ellis,
and before 2021, she was perhaps best known as an actress in EastEnders.
Then last autumn she became a contestant on BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing,
where celebrities are taught how to perform
Latin American and ballroom dancing.
And Rose went on to win.
And for those of you who aren’t fans of the show,
what’s remarkable about Rose is that she’s deaf,
and she's been deaf since birth.
Now, I’m a neuroscientist,
and I’m specifically interested in speech and hearing,
but I’m also a former dancer.
So the story of how anybody could win a dance competition
when they can’t actually hear the music that they’re dancing to,
in front of 11 million people every week for 13 weeks,
was seriously awe-inspiring to me.
And in this talk, I'm going to tell you about the remarkable resilience
and adaptability of the human brain that made that achievement possible.
But before I go into that, let me tell you a little bit more about my own backstory.
I started out as a linguistics student
because I’m fascinated by how we communicate.
And when I finished my degree,
I felt I had a good understanding of the sounds of the English language,
but I had no real idea of what the brain was doing
in order to understand those sounds.
That all felt quite vague and hazy.
So I thought, I’m going to study neuroscience and find this out.
And shortly after I began studying, I read a book about neuroplasticity.
And neuroplasticity is a concept
with regards to how the brain is flexible, and adaptable,
and can change.
And I read about this incredible guy who made a chair that helps blind people see.
And you might be thinking, chairs don’t help people to see,
but bear with me, this chair was special.
This chair was fitted with vibrating elements on the back of the chair,
and in front of the chair was a camera that took a picture of objects
that were in front of the person sat on the chair.
The image was then converted into a vibrating pattern
that was felt on the back of the person who sat down on this chair.
And over time, people who were blind were able to understand
what these vibrations meant, and could tell the difference
between a coffee cup, the pattern of a coffee cup vibrating,
versus the pattern of a telephone vibrating.
Effectively, these people had learned to see through their skin.
Now, this incredible feat is possible
because of something called compensatory plasticity,
which describes the brain’s ability to utilize additional information sources
to compensate when one source might be missing.
And this incredible ability is one that you might have seen in action yourselves.
So whilst it sounds far-fetched,
millions of people have seen compensatory plasticity at work
on a popular Saturday night TV show
that you wouldn’t typically associate with neuroscience,
because millions of people have seen compensatory plasticity
in action through Rose Ayling-Ellis.
Now, I’ve always loved Strictly Come Dancing,
but I loved it so much this season because what Rose did
was she showed everybody that being deaf and having hearing loss
doesn’t mean that you can’t dance.
Having hearing loss and being deaf, you’re just as capable as everybody else.
So I wrote an article for an online publication called The Conversation
about this topic, and that’s why I was asked to come here today,
because I think everybody should know something about hearing loss,
and know something about how remarkable and incredible the human brain is.
But before I talk more about hearing loss,
let me say that if you want to know what it is like living with hearing loss,
speak to somebody from the deaf community.
I today am sharing my scientific perspective with you
in terms of how the brain adapts.
Now, if somebody has hearing loss,
usually this means there’s a problem with the sound waves coming into the ear,
not being sent up to the brain,
so the brain can’t use any sound information.
But what's incredible is the brain is an incredible problem solver.
So even if there's no sound information coming in,
the brain will try to use other sources of information
to understand the world around us.
So in a way, the brain is like this highly skilled chef
who if they don’t have any oil, they know they can use butter,
or if they don’t have any eggs, they could maybe some some mayonnaise.
If we don’t have all the traditional brain ingredients that we need
for a particular function, or to achieve a particular goal,
the brain will use some alternative substitute ingredients
to help us achieve the same outcome.
So in the case of hearing loss, if we don’t have the sense of hearing,
the brain will utilize additional senses such as vision or touch,
to help people experience the auditory world around them.
So in the case of dancing, somebody with hearing loss
will use visual information,
watching their partner, and combining that with careful counting.
And actually, that’s not that different
to how people without hearing loss learn to dance.
You watch your instructor, and then you practice the dance to counts or beats.
But what’s also really helpful for people with hearing loss
is using vibration information as well.
So I recently spoke to a young dancer with hearing loss called Macy,
who’s from Blackpool, which isn’t that far away from here,
and she told me that the vibrations that she felt when the music was played,
and she felt them through her body,
really helped her to know where in a piece of music she was,
and what was happening next in her dance routine.
Now, what’s really incredible is our brain areas that respond to hearing
don’t solely respond to sound information.
If the brain finds that hearing sound is not working,
then those brain areas could be used for something else.
So they may start to respond to information through vision,
or through information from touch.
And that incredible wiring ability might well be there in all of us,
but we don’t need to use it
unless we find ourselves without one of those functions.
Now, the idea that multiple functions work together
to help the brain understand the world around us
is not one restricted to hearing loss and dancing.
So in some of my own research on how we understand speech,
what we find there is that
in situations where the speech is very difficult to understand,
for example, due to a lot of background noise,
lots of busy chatter, passing traffic,
the brain will draw on multiple sources of information
to help the listener understand what they are trying to hear.
Specifically, every sound that you make is associated with a motor sequence
with regards to the movement of your lips, your tongue, your voice box.
If the auditory information, the speech you’re trying to listen to, is ambiguous,
the brain may use some of that motor information instead
to help constrain interpretation
of the speech information that’s coming in,
that’s difficult to understand.
So the brain doesn’t work in this fractionated way
where there’s just one brain region doing speech perception.
There are multiple channels of information and multiple brain regions
working together dynamically to help us understand the world around us
in a way that varies depending on the context,
and the circumstances under which we're currently living in.
So the brain really is an absolutely wonderful piece of machinery.
And you might be wondering how exactly do we understand
which brain regions are linked to these functions?
Well, one approach that I utilize in my research
is something called brain stimulation.
So this is a photograph from my laboratory
where we’re using a brain stimulation device.
And this device applies magnetic pulses to the head.
Now, in terms of how the brain works, the currency of the brain is electricity.
So right now, there’s lots and lots of electricity floating through you,
and going through your brain, communicating messages across cells.
When you apply magnetic brain stimulation, the magnetic pulse goes into the head
and actually creates a local electrical current
directly underneath the tool that we use to apply the magnetic stimulation.
When that local electrical current happens,
it disrupts what would typically be happening in that brain area otherwise.
So if you can disrupt a brain area,
and you think that that brain area is linked to a specific function,
we would expect then that that function should also be disrupted.
And we’re going to demonstrate that for you live, just right now,
with the help of my wonderful research associate, Doctor Kate Slade,
who is going to bring over this brain stimulation device,
and we’ll helpfully stimulate the motor cortex
that controls the movement of my body.
So I’m not going to start doing any ballroom dancing, sadly,
I’m going to do something much, much more simple.
I’m going to perform an action
that just involves simply touching my nose, back and forth.
I’m very capable of being able to do that, as you can see.
And what Kate is going to do is apply some magnetic pulses
to the left side of my head,
because the left side of the head controls the right side of the body and vice versa.
And you’ll know when the pulses are happening,
because there will be some clicking noises that come out from the machine.
Kate Slade: So I’m just going to place the coil on the part of Helen’s brain
that’s involved with movement.
Okay, I’ll count you in and you’ll hear the noise at the TMS machine.
KS: Ready? HN: Yeah. KS: Three, two, one.
(Clicking sound)
(Laughter)
KS: Okay?
HN: Yeah.
KS: Shall we go again?
HN: Absolutely!
KS: Let me just reset it.
All right, I’m going to position the coil again.
And then I’ll count you in again, okay?
HN: Sure thing.
KS: Three, two, one.
(Clicking sound)
(Laughter)
HN: We’ll do it one last time.
This is something that we’ve practiced quite a lot,
so Kate knows exactly how to find the motor cortex,
and it specifically stimulates one region of the brain.
KS: Okay? HN: Yeah.
KS: So I’m going to go on again and find my area,
then I’ll count you in again, okay?
HN: Sure.
KS: Three, two, one.
(Clicking sound)
(Laughter)
HN: It never gets old, even after doing this for several years, I still love it.
Thank you very much, that was awesome.
Round of applause for Kate.
(Applause)
So what you saw there was that by disrupting the motor cortex,
that interrupted the function that I was trying to produce,
the touching of my nose.
And you can see that I’m totally back to normal now.
Don’t worry, anybody in the front row, you’re fine!
The magnetic field only comes out by about three centimeters,
so you’re not going to leave this event with any lasting effects.
But what that also showed you is a real life example
of how resilient the brain is as well.
Because despite those magnetic pulses coming into my brain,
I’m back to normal now - my normal,
I’m back to my typical baseline with regards to how I function.
And that’s incredible.
The brain is astounding at being able to restore equilibrium,
and get us back to normality.
So I’d like to close this talk where I started, with Rose Ayling-Ellis.
What Rose did was she taught the world the joy in being deaf.
She helped the deaf community to feel more confident,
and she showed the hearing community
what life is like living with hearing loss.
But for me, what she did was she showed everybody
the remarkable resilience and adaptability of the human brain.
And those 86 billion cells up there, they really are your best asset.
They can grow and change and adapt in ways that you never thought possible.
So use them wisely.
Thank you.
(Applause)