Mind

Hacks 44-52 Your ears are not simply "eyes for sound." Sound contains quite different information about the world than does light. Light tends to be ongoing, whereas sound occurs when things change: when they vibrate, collide, move, break, exp...

If vision lets you see where something is, hearing tells you when it is. The time resolution of audition is way above that of vision. A cinema screen of 24 images a second looks like a constant display, rather than 24 brief images. A selection of...

Some sounds, like echoes, are not always informative, and there is a mechanism for filtering them out. A major purpose of audition is telling where things are. There's an analogy used by auditory neuroscientists that gives a good impression o...

Pitch exists for sounds because our brains calculate it, and to do that, they must have a reason. All sounds are vibrations in air. Different amplitudes create different sound intensities; different frequencies of vibration create different...

Audition isn't the only function of the inner ear. We have semicircular channels of fluid, two in the horizontal plane, two in the vertical plane, that measure acceleration of the head. This, our vestibular system, is used to maintain our balance...

Our perceptual abilities and sensory acumen differ from one individual to another, making our threshold for detecting faint or ambiguous stimuli vary considerably. The brain is particularly good at making sense of messy data and can often pick ou...

Speech isn't just another set of noises. The brain treats it very differently from ordinary sounds. Speech is predominantly processed on the left side of the brain, while normal sounds are mostly processed on the right. This division is les...

Steven Pinker, in his popular book on the nature of language, The Language Instinct1, encounters the frob-twiddle-tweak continuum as a way of talking about adjusting settings on computers or stereo equipment. The Jargon File, longtime glossary f...

When you're reading a sentence, you don't understand it word by word, but rather phrase by phrase. Phrases are groups of words that can be bundled together, and they're related by the rules of grammar. A noun phrase will include nouns and adjecti...

This means that as processing of different aspects proceeds, previously processed aspects can be used quickly to disambiguate the processing of others. Neural networks are massively parallel computers. Compare this to your PC, which is a seria...