Hands up, who doesn’t get just the teensiest bit nervous about going to the dentist? Not many of you, I’ll wager. Dentophobia – fear of dentists and dental care – is one of the most common phobias, and it’s the high-pitched whine of the dentist’s drill that causes most anxiety. If this applies to you, take heart. You may soon be able to relax (or at least tune out the sound of the drill) and listen to music on your own MP3 player, connected to a noise-canceling device developed by Kings College London in conjunction with Brunel University and London South Bank University.
The prototype device works in a similar way to noise-canceling headphones. It contains a microphone and a chip that analyzes the incoming sound wave, and produces an inverted wave that cancels out unwanted noise. Designed to deal with the very high pitch of the dental drill, it also uses adaptive filtering, where electronic filters lock onto sound waves and remove them, even if the amplitude and frequency change as the drill is being used.
rabid–don’t be silly. You said your whole head vibrates. That would be easy to correct with a whole head anti vibrator. No, you can’t be so general. Gotta narrow it down to where the rubber meets the road.
#21 – Bobbo – I saw one of those on Star Trek. Something about the vibrator/anti-vibrator helped Scottie make the ship come fast. I mean “go” fast.
I like the sound of the drill.
#19
I always refuse any anesthetic. Dentist don’t like that at all but they comply or I leave.
Yes there can be intense pain, but it eventually stops leaving my system full of endorphins(SP?).
I much prefer this way. The dentist tends to be more CAREFUL when he knows I feel everything.
I’m hypersensitive to components of the anesthetic they use, so I am much better off not letting them use it. MUCH less suffering overall.
It doesn’t matter how the sound gets to the ears… either bone conduction or through the ear canal, the ear drum and tiny bones have to receive the vibration to register as a sound. The identically opposite sound waves coming in through the ear canal cancel the sound waves coming in through bone conduction. They’ve tested this apparatus and it works.
#25 hhopper
According to the perfectly reasonable rate scale established in court by the RIAA/MPAA, you owe me $423,269.49 for a single use of my copyrighted inverted sound wave of a high speed dentist’s drill — and I’d best not see it posted anywhere on the Internet, else then you’ll be in real trouble!
As I remember from 8th grade biology: what the brain “hears” is the electrical signal sent to it by the tiny hairs on the cochlea (sp?-fact?-can’t remember the name which is why I dropped out of pre-med) which vibrate in response to the ear drum vibrating from air waves. This motion is transferred thru the ear bones to the cochlea. Then the cochlea transfers this physical motion/vibration to the tiny hairs which vibrate according to their location/natural harmonics/length or whatever creating the electrical signal. Like everything else in the universe: everything is connected, meaning that the ear drum, ear bones, and cochlea are all attached to the bones of the skull. If the bones of the skull vibrate, as in when you fall off a motorcycles without a helmet then this vibration will be picked up as a “sound” as well. Two totally different sources of the originating vibration that are funneled thru the same structure AFTER the ear drum. Can bone vibration be picked up by only the cochlea skipping the ear bones as well? I don’t know, I’d think so with such background chatter happening all the time and it being canceled out by the brain due to the stronger signal normally present from the ear drum?
The brain. Electricity. Self Awareness. The illusion of perceived reality. Great Stuff.
Hopper’s post makes sense. Regardless of how the final sensor (ear to brain) is stimulated, a strong enough precision cancellation wave set will get rid of almost all the freq. range being targeted. I’ve some noise canceling headphones that do a remarkable job of filtering jet engines. I’ll bet drivers for canceling high freq. dentist drills are expensive. A nice application unless you’re 80 and can’t hear the drill anyway).