Top
Best
New

Posted by giuliomagnifico 19 hours ago

EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams(journals.plos.org)
245 points | 165 commentspage 4
vanderZwan 15 hours ago|
Come on guys, the contribution of the research is that it made measurements of how the processing of multiple inputs is represented in EEGs, not whether or not we can handle multiple inputs. Stop acting snarky, it just shows you didn't read beyond the headline.
bitwize 14 hours ago||
My wife's brain could probably do that. I'm not so sure about mine.
j45 17 hours ago||
The DJ is explained.
thenthenthen 16 hours ago|
Many dj mixers offer the option to split the main mix to one ear and the cue’d track to the other, i have never been able to mix like that, only with cue on headphones and main mix out in the room/monitors. Weird
j45 8 hours ago||
Everyone can be different and that's ok.

I know dj's who can rarely hear the song that's currently playing, and only hear all the other songs that can play with it.

Experiencing music is the gift :)

dboreham 11 hours ago||
I read the paper's abstract. They're not actually claiming what commenters here think they are. They're saying that there's some sort of pipeline processing for the task of "listening to speech" and when the subject switches focus from listening to one speaker to another, that pipeline has to drain. And the new stream pipeline has to get loaded up. Not actually surprising when you think about how it would have to work. The same thing likely happens with vision.
fortran77 11 hours ago||
I do a form of this all the time and I've always wondered "how." I can copy Morse Code--hearing the code and writing it down--while carrying on a conversation with someone else. I'm only "encoding" it, in that I have to read it to know what I just copied. The process of hearing a letter or word in Morse and moving my hand to write it has become so automatic that I can do it while having a live conversation with someone in the room.

It would be interesting to know what's going on in my head with an EEG or FMRI...

throwawaysjskdk 16 hours ago||
yep, my wife does this routinely
skor 18 hours ago||
parents tend to yell at the same time and it needs simultaneous processing
vanderZwan 15 hours ago||
Your example is needlessly bleak, but in general: yes, we're a social species and being able to process multiple speech streams seems obviously pretty important in many social contexts involving more than two people.
dboreham 11 hours ago||
Seems doubtful to me that there will be any hardware in our species specific to processing language. It's going to be the same basic hardware as Chimps. Whatever is going on that's related to us being a social species is all software.
vanderZwan 11 hours ago||
Uh, there definitely is "hardware specific to processing language" for our species, they even have their own wiki pages[0][1].

And in general our brains differ significantly from that of a chimpansee. Human brains push neuron density to to absolute limit within the animal kingdom and have unique evolutionary adaptations that allow for it. As a result our species also has mental health disorders unique to us that seem to be cause by the neurons being pushed past that limit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area

eurekin 18 hours ago||
Also explains why we like music with two simultaneous distinct sections (bass + the rest). One without the other doesn't feel as complete
junon 17 hours ago||
This is a completely different phenomenon. Your ear/brain are tuned to rhythmic beats in the lower frequencies (footsteps). We're better at pattern recognition with the lower frequencies.

Also, our brains will encode the differences in registers to evoke emotion differently, which is often used by horror films to make a scene scarier[0]. Evolutionarily this is probably to detect screams or babies crying, a rustling bush, etc.

Speech encoding, at least per this article, has little to do with that. We don't have music encoding so much as we have pattern recognition, instinctual emotional respond to sound, etc.

Another great video about how music is perceived in animals is [1], just while we're on the topic.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-hidden-sounds-...

[1] https://youtu.be/0ZYhyewNQMo?is=0mWSRAzObOD2p32E

nttylock 15 hours ago||
[flagged]
jimbob45 16 hours ago|
If you can listen to someone play the piano with two hands, it’s a short hop to get to speech.
dboreham 11 hours ago|
Not really (except perhaps if it's Stockhausen they're playing). A piece of music played with two hands is still one coherent information stream.