Recognizing is an essential surviving skill. This is understood normally a general aspect when we recognize people, objects or animals by the sound they make. When the very similar objects make very dissimilar sounds we have certain inbuilt ‘pick up clues’ that help us identity the sound and its source.
Scientists now a days are conducting intensive research that is helped by the ‘Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)’ to understand the basic fundamentals of “how the human ear and the brain come together to help us understand our acoustic environment”.
Researchers have observed that the ‘auditory cortex’, the part of human brain that deals with sound is more adapted in each human being and the body system sets the ears in a typical tuning to the world around us. Humans continuously keep learning throughout their lifetime how to localize and identify different sounds. It is more relative in itself. Meaning thereby, if someone could hear the sounds through someone else’s ears the sounds would be altogether different to what normally we hear and recognize.
Some relevant findings of this ongoing research have been published in the current issue of “BBSRC Business”. The scientists are expecting that this research would help in developing more sophisticated hearing aids and more effective speech recognition systems in near future.
At the University of Oxford, Dr Jan Schnupp and his research team has made attempts to study the ‘auditory cortex’ of the brain and discovered that the responses of the ‘auditory cortex’ are dependent on two major parameters. The acoustical properties, like frequency and pitch along with the statistical properties of the soundscape are two important determining factors in this case.
Researchers say that in our surroundings loudness and pitch keep constantly changing. Random shifts in these sounds are regulated with the specified with a statistical regularity. For instance, subtle and gradual changes in the sounds are statistically more regular compared to the large and sudden changes in the sounds.
Dr Schnupp observed that our brains have an adaptation to the subtle and gradual changes in the sounds. The neurons in the ‘auditory cortex’ seem to anticipate and respond in a better way to the gradual changes in the sounds band. Such patterns are more common in natural and musical compositions.
Dr Schnupp, at the University of Oxford Auditory Neuroscience Group, said: “auditory neurons in the brain are adaptable and we learn how to locate and identify sounds. If you could borrow someone else’s ears you would have real difficulty in locating the source of sounds, at least until your brain had relearned how to do it“.
The study also reveals that the ‘auditory cortex’ has no neurons sensitive to different aspects of sound. Researchers also studied the auditory cortex responds to changes in pitch, timbre and frequency and found that most neurons reacted to each change.
Dr Schnupp explained that for the processing of color, form, and motion different neurons come in to play. Neurons in the ‘auditory cortex’ react to different sound properties in different way. It requires further investigations for distinguishing between pitch, spatial location, and timbre. Further studies would enable developing hearing aids that “can blot out background noise and speech recognition systems that can handle different accents”, says Dr. Schnupp.
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