Daphne's Brain is Weird - Official
In the New Scientist this week there's an interesting article about the brain's ability to extract meaning from distorted signals.
It's a distorted version of speech called sine-wave speech. If you hear the sentence firstly in sine-wave speech, you can't understand what it's saying - "it sounds alien and unintelligible, somewhat reminiscent of whistling or birdsong."
But then, if you listen to the normal version, and then go back to the whistly version, the whistly version becomes words, because the bit of your brain that didn't know they were words has switched itself on.
Although nobody can understand the words the first time, once you've heard the proper version you can't "unhear" it and you hear it like that for ever after.
So far so good. But then Stephen, having told me none of the above, simply played me the whistly version and I repeated the words straight back to him and he was very surprised that I could do it, and could mostly do the other examples too, just missing the occasional word.
He thinks it's because my brain is weird, and points out that he has been saying this from time to time for many years now.
I think it's because I am so verbally-orientated that I expect there to be words in everything and am always looking for them - and, on this occasion, I found them.
Matt Davis of the UK Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge says that the sine-wave speech isn't speech-like enough to trigger the brain's speech circuits.
And, following the rigorous scientific test, above, I should like to say HA HA HE'S WRONG, at least in my case. Should I leave my body to medical science, I wonder?
Go on, you try it and see what you can hear. Here's the link. You have to listen to the sine-wave speech versions before the clear speech versions of course, though.
It's a distorted version of speech called sine-wave speech. If you hear the sentence firstly in sine-wave speech, you can't understand what it's saying - "it sounds alien and unintelligible, somewhat reminiscent of whistling or birdsong."
But then, if you listen to the normal version, and then go back to the whistly version, the whistly version becomes words, because the bit of your brain that didn't know they were words has switched itself on.
Although nobody can understand the words the first time, once you've heard the proper version you can't "unhear" it and you hear it like that for ever after.
So far so good. But then Stephen, having told me none of the above, simply played me the whistly version and I repeated the words straight back to him and he was very surprised that I could do it, and could mostly do the other examples too, just missing the occasional word.
He thinks it's because my brain is weird, and points out that he has been saying this from time to time for many years now.
I think it's because I am so verbally-orientated that I expect there to be words in everything and am always looking for them - and, on this occasion, I found them.
Matt Davis of the UK Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge says that the sine-wave speech isn't speech-like enough to trigger the brain's speech circuits.
And, following the rigorous scientific test, above, I should like to say HA HA HE'S WRONG, at least in my case. Should I leave my body to medical science, I wonder?
Go on, you try it and see what you can hear. Here's the link. You have to listen to the sine-wave speech versions before the clear speech versions of course, though.
posted by Daphne at 8:19 pm
3 Comments:
I thought this ability came as standard to any married woman so she can interpret the gibberish her husband comes out with at times.
Like some sort of universal translation and speech recognition gene gets inserted, virus like, into a bride as soon as she utters 'I DO' on the fateful day.
On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong and your brain IS weird, Daphne.
Ian
I'm half weird. I heard "the children were going to the park."
David
Interesting – I just hear them as music. And once I’ve got them into my head as a rhythm it’s actually quite surprising to hear the speech, as often the ‘beat’ falls at a different place in the bar than it would do with the speech.
For example, I heard (with nicely swinging triplets at the start):
DIDDle-dum-DIDDle-dum DUM-da-DUM
(The first beat of the bar at the beginning, therefore.)
However, the natural speech stress is of course:
He was SITTing at his DESK at the OFFice.
with the first beat of the ‘bar’ logically on ‘sitting’,
not, as I heard:
HE was sitting AT his desk AT the offICE
Mmm. Seems like I’ve listened to too much acid house in my time to ever hear these as speech. Just try playing them over and over again.
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