[HN Gopher] Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words ...
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Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear
Author : hhs
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-11-07 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nyu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nyu.edu)
| makz wrote:
| Probably related, I'm not an native English speaker, and I have
| noticed that sometimes I don't understand what someone is telling
| me in this language , just one or two words, and it kind of gets
| saved on a buffer in my mind and they keep talking and after a
| few seconds what was in the buffer gets "processed" and I
| understand it at the same time that whatever is being said to me
| currently. It feels weird.
| 1-more wrote:
| I had this years later from The Simpsons of all things. In "Who
| Shot Mr. Burns (Part 2)" Tito Puente has a musical number
| "Senor Burns"[0] where the singer calls Burns "el diablo con
| dinero" which I remembered the sound of but not the meaning
| until I learned some Spanish like 10 years later.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kdDet7G14
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| This is something that also happens as you age - even if your
| hearing remains decent, Central Auditory Processing Disorder
| becomes an issue. I imagine it will be more pronounced with a
| second language, so you have to look forward to.
|
| https://www.rehab.research.va.gov/jour/05/42/4suppl2/martin....
| russdill wrote:
| I have an oddly similar sensation when becoming aware of a
| sound that woke me.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I've had this happen in places were multiple languages are
| spoken.
|
| Hearing something in Language B, but not realizing, so the
| brain processes it in Language A. Then not being able to
| understand for a few seconds until the brain realizes that what
| I heard is actually Language B, and suddenly the first seconds
| of the speech make sense.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker and I have the same thing, where
| someone will say something I don't understand, and then in the
| middle of asking what they mean, I realise what they were
| trying to say (The processing just took longer than I expected)
| lilyball wrote:
| > _The researchers found that the brain processes speech using a
| buffer_
|
| This is not news to anyone with ADHD who regularly says "what?"
| before immediately figuring out what was already said and
| responding to it. It feels exactly like reprocessing an existing
| auditory buffer.
| mad44 wrote:
| Is this a specific thing to ADHD? I do this a lot, and I am
| ADD, but I thought this is a common thing.
| modeless wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the connection to AI. Many
| models need "positional encodings" as part of their input in
| order to to understand the spatial or temporal relationship
| between different input tokens. It's not at all surprising to me
| that the brain would have an equivalent.
|
| It's not always clear what form these encodings should take. If
| we could figure out the actual encodings used by the brain, I bet
| we would find that they have big advantages over the ones we're
| currently using.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We hugely underestimate how _processed_ all of our senses are.
|
| Hearing doesn't listen to pressure waves. It does some very
| complex real time source separation to distinguish between
| different sound sources.
|
| Then it performs overtone and resonance matching to identify
| different speakers.
|
| Then it follows up with phoneme recognition to identify words -
| which somehow identifies phoneme invariants across a wide range
| of voice types, including kids, male/female, local/foreign and
| social register(class)/accent.
|
| Then it recognises emotional cues from intonation, which again
| are invariant across a huge range of sources.
|
| And then finally its labels all of that as linguistic metadata,
| converts the phonemes into words, and parses the word
| combinations.
|
| It's not until you try to listen to a foreign language that you
| hear the almost unprocessed audio for what it is. And even that
| still has elements of accent and intonation recognition.
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| jvm___ wrote:
| And, if it's your native language, you can't help but process
| it.
|
| This is why I like talking to 4-year-olds, they see the world
| as it truely is, and can communicate it back out. They don't
| have all the conditioned learning the rest of us have, but can
| see a clearer picture without bias.
| antiterra wrote:
| I've heard garbled words over a bad connection that I didn't
| understand, only to have my brain parse them seconds later
| without intentional effort. It makes me wonder, is the language
| center processing the memorized version of sound here or is it
| reprocessing at the lower level?
| SllX wrote:
| This is basically an everyday experience for me, and not
| limited to telephone calls. My hearing is not great, and I'll
| often ask someone to repeat something only to finally finish
| parsing it about a second after I asked because in the
| intervening time my brain reconstructed a signal from a bunch
| of noise.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Fascinating... this happens to me a lot also, but I never
| really realized what I was experiencing until reading your
| comment. Later on I will feel guilty asking people to
| repeat things when I actually understood them. I never
| considered what you are saying, that I didn't yet have the
| information when I asked them, but later did.
|
| I often wonder if my hearing is poor, or if I am just
| overly sensitive to the possibility of mis-hearing people,
| that I would rather err on the side of confusion. I
| overhear a lot of other people talking that I can tell
| misunderstand each other, but neither are aware, and I
| wouldn't want to do that.
| foobazgt wrote:
| I've had the same experience my entire life. That said,
| testing shows my hearing isn't great, but it's not horrible
| either. I even have an exceptional ability to identify
| actors solely by their voice when others can't identify
| them at all. I've often wondered if there is something else
| going on that runs deeper than just surface level
| "hearing". Like I'm hearing slower but more deeply.
| SllX wrote:
| I don't know if I'm hearing more deeply, but basically
| the same experience: failed every hearing test I ever
| took but I'm not deaf either. Just need to rely more on
| post-processing than others, and the best I've been able
| to figure is I didn't get enough socialization at
| critical points of my early development, which is true, I
| just can't prove that it's also related to my hearing.
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| Non linguistic elements of verbal communication are so
| universal nobody even really notices when fictional alien
| species in media communicate to human protagonists. It's
| noncontroversial to the audience that hostile/non-hostile,
| instruction, friendliness, cooperation, etc, are all embedded
| in the tones of all animals, robots, and even tree creatures
| throughout the universe.
| henrydark wrote:
| This isn't surprising given that it's well known that we
| share more than 90% of our DNA with tree creatures across the
| universe
| mahathu wrote:
| >And then finally its labels all of that as linguistic
| metadata, converts the phonemes into words, and parses the word
| combinations.
|
| How did the scientific studies show this?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| It implies a single buffer so there is a delay in cognition which
| implies our consciousness is always lagging behind physical
| reality.
| notacoward wrote:
| Similar things happen with vision BTW. When you start looking
| into it, what our eyes and ears and the connected parts of the
| brain actually do is pretty crazy. Our sensory systems are
| eventually consistent, and there _are_ glitches, but amazingly it
| all mostly works.
| codeulike wrote:
| _When you start looking into it_
| notacoward wrote:
| Ha! I wish I could say that was intentional. Thanks for
| pointing it out.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| Essentially our hardware isn't perfect, and there's delays so
| the software has a bunch of patches and workarounds to
| interpolate what it believes is occurring, which happens to be
| right a lot of the time. Normally only with illusions where
| this reality is confronted to us.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| I think it could be almost described as a full on 3D rendering
| engine, we are getting the raw data from outside ourselves, but
| what we see is completely built up inside our own minds. Does
| that make sense?
| tornato7 wrote:
| I like that. We are always processing information in 3D, not
| just vision but you can imagine hearing someone behind you
| and your brain immediately places them in 3D space based on
| your prior knowledge of your surroundings.
|
| It's amazing sensor fusion because you can
| see/hear/smell/touch something all at the same time and
| associate it correctly with one object.
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| It's much much more like our new AI image generators than a
| physical simulation of light and volume with mathematical
| precision. Imagination is a "good enough" fluctuation of
| seemingly random stimulation of neurons that we're able to
| judge as being quite approximate to the same stimulation
| pattern that we get from our physical sensors. Thinking about
| a scene or music and "hearing it" is like a unit test.
| notakio wrote:
| It has been illuminating for me over the past few weeks to
| have lost hearing in my right ear as a result of a lingering
| sinus infection; I understood that identifying the direction
| a sound might come from would be difficult with only one ear,
| but I had no idea how crucial it was for speech
| comprehension, particularly when any other noise is also
| present.
|
| I've found that I can barely even discern that speech is
| present within a mix of noises, much less am I able to
| comprehend the speech until such time as I can reduce the
| other noises to a minimal level, and directionally point my
| ear at the source of said speech. Conference calls were quite
| a delight there for a while.
| drcongo wrote:
| There was an excellent PBS show called The Brain with Dr David
| Eagleman which, in one episode, went into detail on the way the
| brain re-syncs what it sees with what it hears, essentially doing
| a tiny bit of time travelling to ensure that your world makes
| sense. It's well worth seeking out.
| spideymans wrote:
| I couldn't find the show, but he has a related lecture on
| YouTube
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_e99qbJ4U
| jvm___ wrote:
| Is this why we turn down the car volume when looking for a
| house number? The resync process is taking too much bandwidth,
| or messing with our visual/temporal system, so reducing the
| audio input helps the system.
| smeej wrote:
| I'm sure I'm missing some important nuance or something, but it
| sounds like what they're saying is, "You can understand spoken
| words because your brain processes the sounds in the order you
| hear them."
|
| This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world to me.
| _Everything_ about me experiences time sequentially. If I
| remember things, I can cast my mind back in time, but I still
| remember things from beginning to end, not in some other order.
|
| I'd have assumed my brain processes my visual inputs sequentially
| too. I can't even think what other option there might be. Somehow
| everything I've seen or heard over some set period of time hits
| me all at once?
|
| What am I missing here?
| LocalH wrote:
| > Everything about me experiences time sequentially.
|
| That's not entirely true. Ever look at a clock with a second
| hand and see the hand linger a little longer the first second?
| Congratulations, you just saw things out of order. Your brain
| did not receive input for the period of time when your eyes
| were in motion towards the clock, so it lied to you and filled
| in the missing data _after the fact_ once it started getting
| visual input again.
| codeulike wrote:
| There's an interesting sortof thought-trap when thinking about
| these things - which this article doesn't fall into - but I'll
| mention it anyway cos its fun. Dennett calls it the Cartesian
| Theatre - and the idea is that when thinking about how the brain
| works, we may mistakenly imagine that once the brain has (say)
| processed these timestamped sounds, it then puts them all back
| together somewhere to 'play them back' to our consciousness. But
| thats a paradox because then you'd need another consciousness to
| interpret the reconstructed sound. Dennett likened it to
| imagining a little homunculus inside your brain that is watching
| a screen that plays back your conscious exprience. Of course it
| can't work like that, because it becomes recursive.
|
| So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put it) it
| (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in the right
| order again. That bit of processing is done. A corollary to this
| idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the
| brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back
| 'together'. That also means there is no one instant in time where
| we become 'conscious' of things. If its spread throughout the
| brain is must necessarily be smeared across a (fairly short)
| internal of time too.
|
| I think these days with neural nets being better understood
| perhaps we dont fall into this thought trap so much.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put
| it) it (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in
| the right order again. That bit of processing is done._
|
| I'm not sure I buy it. It wont have a "homunculus", but it
| could very well have a pipeline of autonomous processing
| centers, where the second part needs to have them in order.
|
| uniq is not a homunculus here either, but still needs its input
| in order: cut -d, -f1 xxx.csv | sort | uniq |
| wc -l
|
| (yeah, uniq is not needed here, but that's not the point)
| retrac wrote:
| > A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most
| likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place'
| where things come back 'together'. That also means there is no
| one instant in time where we become 'conscious' of things.
|
| People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before
| they consciously become aware of the action. This delay can be
| quite a few seconds. Under ideal conditions with brain imaging,
| it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before
| they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press
| one of two buttons).
|
| I've had hints of this experience subjectively, from time to
| time. Action, then thought, in that order. I'd like a sip of
| water; with particularly careful awareness of relative
| sequencing, I'm fairly sure that, sometimes, when this thought
| percolates to the surface of my mind, my hand is already moving
| towards the glass.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if the conscious self is mostly just a
| passive observer, constantly coming up with post-hoc
| rationalizations to explain why the body just acted the way it
| did. Decidedly unnerving, but that seems to be the nature of
| our being.
|
| Multiple loci of consciousness is, IMO, fairly strongly
| supported by what happens with brain damage. Very rarely,
| people with damage to the corpus callosum linking the
| hemispheres of the brain, develop something like alien hand
| syndrome, where half of their body adopts complex and
| seemingly-intentional behaviour, that the person is quite
| unaware of consciously. This manifestation is sometimes
| described as having a personality and desires, which are often
| similar, but not identical, to the conscious part of that
| person.
| tudorw wrote:
| https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consci.
| ..
| pessimizer wrote:
| People can act with "seemingly-conscious" intent without
| _ever_ becoming "consciously" aware of the action. Eric
| Schwitzgebel wrote a lot about this; one of my favorites of
| his is _How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The
| Case of Human Echolocation_.
|
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| There is an excellent (very) short story by Ted Chiang called
| "What's expected of us" that I think you'll like.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
| Filligree wrote:
| It's something, alright. I just find it a little...
| strange.
|
| Compatibilism isn't a new invention, and Chiang ought to
| have heard of it, but it isn't mentioned at all in the
| story.
| qbit wrote:
| Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this
| part:
|
| "Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my
| sending this warning won't alter those proportions."
|
| Of course sending the warning will have an effect because
| it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read
| it! They don't get to _choose_ how they will be affected by
| it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a
| person has no free will is not to say that they are not
| affected by their environment.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Of course sending the warning will have an effect_
|
| Compared to not sending it? Of course - but that's a
| counterfactual. The present leads to the future, where
| this message is sent; the act of sending the message did
| not alter the past.
| officialjunk wrote:
| by this logic, with humans having millions of neurons in other
| parts of the body, such as the gut, we may have consciousness
| spread out over the body, not just the brain.
| [deleted]
| coldtea wrote:
| Not sure about consciousness, but some of its processing is a
| given, the gut is even called a "second brain" by scientists
| in related fields.
| cscheid wrote:
| Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who's done work in the
| area, and has decent popsci books about this idea. I read the
| older ones, "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What
| Happens", and they're fun, good reads. Apparently he's
| written more on the subject as well.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Perhaps there's a reason for the cliches - "go with your
| gut", "what is your gut telling you?". It's pretty common to
| feel like some emotions (anxiety, excitement, shame) are
| radiating from the gut. Maybe there is actually a
| physiological link for certain base emotions?
| practice9 wrote:
| It's common for meditation practitioners to relax their
| body (relax tense muscles) in order to gain access to
| calmer states of mind
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Dennett is making a (naive) philosophical point about the
| nature of consciousness, not a linquistic point about the
| nature of language perception.
|
| You don't need a Cartesian Theatre, or even strict reassembly.
| I'd expect something more like a hierarchical/nested structure
| of template recognition for common word sequences and sentence
| structures.
|
| Brains notice certainly when out of order are words. But brains
| can still make sense of them - with some extra effort - as long
| as there's still some templated structure left to work with.
|
| You need to randomise much longer sequences before the
| templating breaks down.
|
| None of this says anything relevant about what consciousness
| may or may not be. It's still the same old problem of qualia,
| only now it's about qualia that are perceived as linguistic and
| conceptual relationships, not trivial perceptual
| identifications. ("Dog", "orange", "philosopher", etc.)
| [deleted]
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| This is why (unmentioned company) runs on timeseries.
| Sommer wrote:
| This reminds me of the correlogram modeling of auditory
| perception where the cochlea uses autocorrelation to encode
| temporal information of a sound signal. A neat idea that helps
| describe a lot of time encoded auditory processes.
|
| Short explanation:
| https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~malcolm/correlograms/index.html?...
| [stanford.edu]
| jrnichols wrote:
| The more we understand this, the more others will finally
| understand why "just wear a mask, it's so simple" was extremely
| ableist and discriminatory for some of us to hear for the past 2
| years.
| sebringj wrote:
| That seems so efficient to do it all at once like that. The brain
| seems to be this massively parallel/buffered biological machine
| with an assembly pipeline to the consciousness center(s)? Like a
| mix of specific architecture layout (software 1.0) with a bunch
| of pattern matchers (software 2.0) maybe but I'm complete layman
| here obviously.
| aix1 wrote:
| I wonder if Auditory Processing Disorder could be related to this
| mechanism.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
| BWStearns wrote:
| I wonder if this is part of why it's nearly impossible to form
| sentences when you hear an echo of your own voice on zoom or
| something, like your brain perceives it as a duplicate chunk that
| was mis-timestamped.
| kraquepype wrote:
| I do wonder myself if there is some research on this, it is
| irrationally annoying when I hear an echo of myself while
| talking, so much so that I just can't proceed, it would be nice
| to know why that is.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Look at research on stutters. There are treatments for
| stutter that involve replaying one's own voice back to them
| with a delay.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_Auditory_Feedback
| anon291 wrote:
| Reminds me of positional encoding in attention based networks.
| johntb86 wrote:
| I was thinking that too, but this description makes it seem
| more like a type of windowing rather than the position encoding
| in a transformer (which is fixed): "the information [...] gets
| passed between different neural populations in a predictable
| way, which serves to time-stamp each sound with its relative
| order."
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