Susan E. Shore, Ph.D.

Over the past decade, the Shore Laboratory has studied the contributions of multisensory systems to auditory processing. In particular, the lab discovered that ‘touch-sensitive’ neurons in the brain, that receive input from the face and head, send neural projections to the auditory system. These projections terminate in the first stop in the brain, the cochlear nucleus, which receives input directly from the cochlea.  Our work has shown that these ‘somatosensory’ neurons can alter the cochlear nucleus response to sound. Most remarkably, after deafness, there is a strong enhancement in somatosensory influences on the cochlear nucleus, as if in compensation for the loss of input from the cochlea. An undesirable side effect of these somatosensory inputs, which are excitatory, is the development of tinnitus (ringing in the ear). The lab's past work demonstrated that in animals with tinnitus (tested behaviorally), the major change in the cochlear nucleus was an increase in excitation from the somatosensory system (see press release). Work extending these findings is now focused on synaptic plasticity as an underlying mechanism to explain the long-term nature of these changes. Ongoing work is laying the groundwork for treatments that include specific, patterned stimulation that may reverse the increased excitation that contributes to tinnitus (see 2018 press release).