Why should the duration matter so much? If you are going to restore the signal what difference does it make.
What about someone who has never heard at all? How do congenitally deaf people hear at all when their cochlear implants are turned on?
A recent interview with Lamba mentions @11:42 that in animal models the brain can even sort optic information when it has never even had vision before (the church of cog neuroscience won't like that).
A Van De Berg paper on the vestibular prosthetic showed a sufferer who had no balance for over 20 years who "instantly" responded with eye reflexes to the restoration of information from the replicated ear signal, and that was with a prosthetic, imagine what a replaced biological organ could do.
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The body remembers!
We all hear the "tinnitus is in the brain" rhetoric, but often its not mentioned why it began, there is almost ALWAYS an ear lesion. It is well known in the field that cochlear implants often eliminate tinnitus (obviously this is not every case), this can happen even with hearing aids for some, why is this? It is because the information is restored, it is all information.
Haptic information, optic information, hearing (high frequency information) vestibular (low frequency information), olfaction, taste and surely many more systems mammals use to sample the environment that are yet to be be discovered. We are (most of us) born healthy and do not have problems sampling our environment as our body is young and healthy, but then aging happens, for some of us sadly, much too soon.
I am not just expecting tinnitus to reverse, with restoration of the biological organs function, I am looking for increases in reflexes, cognition, spacial awareness, improved balance, personality transformation and even physiological changes in things like heart health, postural control and lung function etc. I am expecting "spectacular" results, especially in the elderly, I really want to see what this technology can do for older adults, I cannot wait to see the effects on those left in a nursing home to rot. Good hearing will turn out to be much more important for health than is currently accepted by medicine.
Its repair/restoration of function through treatment will result in enormous cost saving throughout the world. One might argue that is only the realization of the cost of hearing damage that is driving the current race to clinic.
