The present study was designed to assess the effects of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program on strength of the nervous system, perceptual reactance, reaction time, and auditory threshold. Three reaction time indices of strength of the nervous system were utilized: 1) Nebylitsyn's index, 2) the slope index, and 3) the low level stimulation index. Absolute auditory threshold was the fourth...

The primary goal of the current project is to better understand auditory masking by determining masking patterns for a broad variety of environmental noise types, and define the mechanisms that govern auditory signal processing in environmental noise. Behavioral threshold methods developed at SSC San Diego (Finneran, Carder, Schlundt, & Ridgway, 2005) allow thresholds to be obtained rapidly (i....

It is generally thought that background noise can mask auditory information. However, how the noise specifically transforms neuronal auditory processing in a level-dependent manner remains to be carefully determined. Here, with in vivo loose-patch cell-attached recordings in layer 4 of the rat primary auditory cortex (A1), we systematically examined how continuous wideband noise of different le...

Acoustic sensitivity of the vestibular apparatus is well-established, but the contribution of vestibular receptors to the late auditory evoked potentials of cortical origin is unknown. Evoked potentials from 500 Hz tone pips were recorded using 70 channel EEG at several intensities below and above the vestibular acoustic threshold, as determined by vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs)....

Objective(s): Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is the major cause of acquired hearing loss.  Celecoxib, a cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitor, is a non- steroidal anti- inflammatory drug (NSAID) with known antioxidant and antineoplastic activity. Therefore, we monitored the extent of temporary noise- induced threshold shifts (TTS) and cochlear damage caused by high level 4- kHz noise exposure t...