The cochlea is like a snail-shell shaped organ, lined with hairs. When the sound wave - or more specifically the vibration - reaches a bunch of hairs, they in turn fire a bunch of neurons.
The distance the sound wave travels into the organ is related to whether it is a high pitched or low pitched sound. The hairs are essentially "dumb", they only trigger the neuron firings when they detect the vibration.
So regenerating the hairs in the cochlea definitely won't change one's "natural" hearing, but for those that have had missing or damaged hairs for a long time, there'll definitely be an adjustment period where the brain has to re-learn how to interpret the new input. (About 2 weeks or so)
If I'm not mistaken, though, hair cells aren't really "fungible" / identical, right?
>Auditory hair cells are specialized along the length of the cochlea to respond to specific sound frequencies. ... Each of our roughly 16,000 hair cells is dedicated to a narrow frequency range. These cells are ordered along the basilar membrane according to the frequencies they detect. [1]
In that sense, they're dumb in terms of just encoding oscillation patterns, kind of like an electric guitar pickup, but even though a pickup is "dumb", you can get different results depending on the placement and type.
I'm just wondering if and how the newly generated hair cells somehow fit in where they're needed, and how general or controllable the process is.
they should be identical/fungible, it's the location that corresponds to the sound frequency, the nerves to be triggered are in the walls of the cochlea, underneath the hairs.
The distance the sound wave travels into the organ is related to whether it is a high pitched or low pitched sound. The hairs are essentially "dumb", they only trigger the neuron firings when they detect the vibration.
So regenerating the hairs in the cochlea definitely won't change one's "natural" hearing, but for those that have had missing or damaged hairs for a long time, there'll definitely be an adjustment period where the brain has to re-learn how to interpret the new input. (About 2 weeks or so)