When you’re suddenly able to understand someone despite their thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain appears to be re-tuning to recognize speech that was previously incomprehensible.
UC Berkeley neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person’s brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found.
The observations confirm speculation that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language – the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes – continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment.
>> Read the full story in Berkeley News
By Christopher R. Holdgraf, Wendy de Heer, Brian Pasley, Jochem Rieger, Nathan Crone, Jack J. Lin, Robert T. Knight, and Frédéric E. Theunissen.
