Out of all five senses, hearing is one of the most important senses that we have. We depend on it to communicate every single day. Our lives would be much more difficult without it. From listening to a friend in the mall to enjoying music in the car, our brains quickly process everything we hear daily. A recent study has figured out how the brain is affected when it processes sound.
The study, led by Nina Kraus at Northwestern University, took place in schools, community centers, and clinics—thousands of individuals from newborns to 90 years of age participated, allowing scientists to see how sound affects people of all ages and backgrounds. Study subjects underwent a series of tests that enabled the researchers to see how brain treats the essential aspects of sound, such as pitch, timing and timbre. Participants listened to numerous samples of music and speech, and sensors were placed on their heads to measure the electricity generated by the brain upon hearing noise. Researchers obtained the sound-waves for each noise/music sample and the corresponding brain-wave samples collected from participants when they heard each sample. The sound-wave samples and the brain-wave samples turned out to be very similar. In another study that focused on how timbre is perceived, certain neurons in neurophysiological receptive fields could be seen firing in various ways when exposed to different frequencies of sound in the cortical maps that were created; different areas had different excitatory/preferred responses and inhibitory/suppressed responses.
Image Source: ilbusca
The results from the first study suggested that various things affect the brain’s ability to process sound. Some examples include playing music, learning a new language, aging, language disorders, and hearing loss. It was discovered that through life’s stages, people that actively play a musical instrument as a hobby are able to hear in a noisy environment (e.g. listening to a friend talk while in a sports stadium full of noisy fans) better than people that do not play an instrument. Being able to speak another language and/or make music also partially offset sound processing disadvantages. Poverty and a mother’s education level influence how a child processes sound. In addition, the way preliterate kids process the three essential aspects of sound can predict how well they can read in the future.
The way that we process sound can reveal many things about ourselves. Our lifestyles can vastly affect the way we hear the world around us—more than we could ever imagine.
Feature Image Source: Music by Jesse Kruger
