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_Atheius_ t1_j03be6h wrote

This...wasn't a given?

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SavageFugu t1_j03x9rb wrote

I'm probably being stupid, but I have to agree with you on not quite getting it.

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New_Walls t1_j03yweb wrote

It might seem obvious but knowing how things work on a smaller scale helps us fix things when they don’t work on a larger scale.

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jawshoeaw t1_j0517t4 wrote

Yeah I must be missing something. Maybe what they’re saying is the audio is first encoded, then sent to the brain, then analyzed and decoded but because the way the brain “saves” the audio , it needs to keep track of which sound was first. On a CD the data is stored in space, in a line. In digital storage there is a file. In your brain I’m guessing it’s not so linear

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SavageFugu t1_j056um7 wrote

It's apparently beyond my fields of knowledge. I'm sure it makes perfect to someone, I'm just not that guy.

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jawshoeaw t1_j057p2d wrote

Well think of it this way: unless our brains are recording the audio exactly the same way a computer does , there has to be a way to time-stamp the information. Otherwise it would be just a jumble of incoherent sounds. Take what I’m writing for example: you are reading from left to right. So all is good. Now imagine if every word I typed was written on a separate scrap of paper and put into a bag. You put your hand in the bag and pull out words randomly. Total nonsense. But if I put a number on each one you could reconstruct the meaning.

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LuckFree5633 t1_j06q6yx wrote

You’ve just described my severe adhd brain on and off Adderall. I’ve always described it to people as imagine all my thoughts are spinning all jumbled up in a ball and I have to pick them out as they fly by and hope they make sense. When I take Adderall it’s as if all my thoughts are in a line and I can think and see them all so clearly.

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Nappyheaded t1_j060ov0 wrote

Time tends to move forward and the sounds are made over time... I thought we knew this

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WelldoneMrSteak t1_j05mwsi wrote

I think another way to think of it is a lemon is yellow, and they're looking into why it's yellow. Even if phenomena is obvious, proving it is still hard to do and understanding it can allow for different applications

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TNShadetree t1_j03fspe wrote

Wow, you mean we string sounds together to mean different things to communicate. Just completely shocked!

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Sillloc t1_j03grl6 wrote

Well the really cool thing is that we can tell when something is said first by hearing it and then marking the time and comparing it to other sounds which would have been marked later. Our brain can then read back these time discrepancies in order to determine the order in which we head a sound

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aoechamp t1_j05q8jo wrote

Sound is processed in chronological order. What a shocker. Here I thought we were hearing things in reverse

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MorgaseTrakand t1_j043i4b wrote

I think it's similar to understanding how your car works. At a base level you know that when you press the accelerator gas goes into the engine and the car moves. But if you understand the more specific order and process of it: it allows you to understand your car better overall and, more importantly, helps you pinpoint problem areas when things go wrong

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seawaver1 t1_j075zgz wrote

Is that what they mean when they say a car is a melon? I mean lemon?

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SwitchShift t1_j04gaut wrote

The real research is understanding how this is tracked by neural populations - the article says researchers found a sort of buffer system that can keep track of three phonetic sounds at a time in order. It looks like rather than a separate encoding for time stamps, the neural populations fire in sequence, so the signals in the buffer propagate through populations (at least that’s what I understood). It’s not so surprising that this happens, but it is interesting that these scientists seem to have worked out some of the detailed mechanisms of how it happens.

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Timedoutsob t1_j04frup wrote

No that's the beauty of good science. We test stuff that seems obvious and intuitive. Sometimes we get surprised by the results. This is particularly true for how thought or the brain works.

How we think and perceive our brains work is often vastly different than how it does in reality.

Daniel dennet is a good source for some of these brain illusions if you will.

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Zazenp t1_j05am3y wrote

This is discussing the biology of the brain and not the cognition of it. It’s important to remember that our brain is nothing more than neurons that either fire or don’t fire. The neurons don’t have consciousness themselves. You can identify a “ck” sound as different from a “oh” sound because different neurons pathways fire when they detect different audio signals as they hit your ear. That means each sound goes down a different pathway in your brain. Those pathways are NOT exactly the same length which means they may not hit your “audio processing cognition areas” in the correct order.

This is exploring the mechanism the brain uses to know the order of the syllables heard in spite of them going through different pathways. They found a neurological “buffer” that seems to be firing in patterns that would support a time stamp system so the brain can keep track of the word of sounds it heard to form them together as words.

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keylimedragon t1_j058c49 wrote

This is just my educated guess from reading the article, but it sounds like there's some fast but simple circuitry that just listens for sounds from the ear and fills a buffer, timestamping each sound as it goes. Then periodically the buffer gets dumped into a larger portion of the brain that recognizes meaning. If the brain had each sound dumped individually in order it would be much less efficient. So this is just an optimization so it can understand more speech faster by batching the sounds? If so, this is kinda like how a computer network batches data into packets instead of sending 1's and 0's one at a time.

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efvie t1_j05qs87 wrote

This is a fascinating question both because the intuition might be that there is no need to specifically 'mark' sound, and on the other hand there's the question of exactly what can the body use as a timestamp. What mechanism can mark a signal to have occurred before another, if the signals arrive somewhere out of order?

I’d love to understand how these different neural areas work, exactly — is it a matter of the rest of the machinery effectively writing and reading these areas in a fixed order (and then looping back because it's not an infinite buffer, only long enough), or if there's a different sort of mechanism at play, like each of those different areas introducing a delay of its own. Sounds more like the former?

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MooseKick4 t1_j06h0q9 wrote

There’s a difference between a hypothesis and a theory

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