Electrical Stimulation of the Auditory Nerve in Man

Abstract

<h3>Introduction</h3> THIS is basically a case report on long-term direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve in man. The report is supplemented by some historical facts, and by selected comments on electrophysiology, physical chemistry, and perceptual psychology. These comments are sometimes injected between segments of experimental observations and thereby tend to favor one interpretation of the data over others. To counterbalance that trend it was elected to describe as many observations as possible, even though some may seem redundant and others incomplete. This sometimes makes dull reading, but I hope it also makes this report as free from experimenter bias as can be achieved. The study was initially designed to answer questions raised by our own previous experience with electrical stimulation and by the writings of others. We especially planned to study two aspects of perception: (1) the resolution obtainable by discrete stimulation of several small populations of auditory nerve