The earliest steps in our perception of sound are very well understood.
Although she is not ready to abandon more conventional theories about how the brain processes complex auditory information, she finds the results “provocative” because they hint that “maybe we don’t actually have a very good idea of what’s going on.” Turning a Hierarchy on Its Head “This study is a monumental undertaking,” said Dana Boebinger, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University who was not involved in the work. But growing evidence, including the recent study on speech, hints that auditory processing works very differently - so much so that scientists are starting to rethink what the various parts of the auditory system are doing and what that means for how we decipher rich soundscapes. Much of the prevailing wisdom about our perception of sounds is based on analogies to what we know about computations performed in the visual system. Yet in doing so, the discovery doesn’t just call into question more established theories about speech processing it also challenges ideas about how the entire auditory system works. The work offers hints of a new explanation for how the brain can unbraid overlapping streams of auditory stimuli so quickly and effectively. The findings suggest that how the brain makes sense of speech diverges dramatically from scientists’ expectations, with the signals from the ear branching into distinct brain pathways at a surprisingly early stage in processing - sometimes even bypassing a brain region thought to be a crucial stepping-stone in building representations of complex sounds. But in a paper published in Cell in August, a team of researchers challenged that model, reporting instead that the auditory system often processes sound and speech simultaneously and in parallel.
0 kommentar(er)
