Researchers found that when faced with many different sounds, such as notes in a violin melody, the brain doesn’t bother processing every individual pitch, but instead quickly summarizes them to get an overall gist of what is being heard<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The study, published today (Wednesday, June 12) in the journal Psychological Science<\/i>, could potentially improve the ability of hearing aids<\/span> to help people tune into one conversation when multiple people are talking in the background, something people with normal hearing do effortlessly. Also, if speech recognition software<\/span> programs could emulate the information compression that takes place in the human brain<\/span>, they could represent a speaker’s words with less processing power and memory<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In the study, participants could accurately judge the average pitch of a brief sequence of tones. Surprisingly, however, they had difficulty recalling information about individual tones within the sequence, such as when in the sequence they had occurred<\/strong>.<\/p>\n “This research suggests that the brain automatically transforms a set of sounds into a more concise summary statistic – in this case, the average pitch,” said study lead author Elise Piazza, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in the Vision Science program. “This transformation is a more efficient strategy for representing information about complex auditory sequences than remembering the pitch of each individual component of those sequences<\/strong>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the UC Berkeley press release via MedicalXpress: New research by neuroscientists at UC Berkeley, suggests that the human brain is not detail-oriented, but opts for the big picture when… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,60,324],"tags":[42,94],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14159"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14159"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14214,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14159\/revisions\/14214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"mind](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/mind-brain-maze.jpg\")
New research by neuroscientists at UC Berkeley, suggests that the human brain is not detail-oriented, but opts for the big picture when it comes to hearing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n