Abstract
There has been some question as to whether the Wever and Bray 1 phenomenon will prove to be an accurate tool for the study of hearing in animals. These authors showed that electrical currents could be picked up from the eighth nerve of the cat with a suitable amplifier. With telephone receiver or cathode ray oscillograph such currents are found to have fundamentally the same frequency as the sound producing them; that is, if the 256 tuning fork is sounded near the ear of a cat properly hooked up, the sound of the fork is transmitted by the cochlea of the animal and can be picked up by an amplifier in another room and can be converted into sound or a graphic sine wave of 256 double vibrations. A similar phenomenon is obtained if the primary electrode is placed on or near the round window—this is called “the cochlear effect”.
Several studies 2 , 3 , 4 have reported results tending to show that the cochlear effect may not correlate with hearing, while others 5 , 6 have recently reported evidence of such correlation. On the other hand, from the point of view of an attempt to explain the cochlear mechanism, there have been various experiments to eliminate portions of the auditory response by stimulation 5 , 7 , 8 and by drugs. 9
Hallpike and Rawdon-Smith 10 have recently reported that a crystal of sodium chloride in the niche of the round window abolishes the cochlear effect. In a series of experiments on the cause of nerve deafness, we have tried several other substances on the round window. We find that glycerin and solutions, as well as crystals of sodium chloride, calcium chloride and quinine dihydrochloride all produce abolition of the cochlear effect if left in the niche of the round window long enough.
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