15. Hearing and Speech

MIT 9.13 The Human Brain, Spring 2019
Instructor: Nancy Kanwisher

Humans use hearing in species-specific ways, for speech and music. Ongoing research is working out the functional organization of these and other human auditory skills.

* NOTE: Lecture 14: New Methods Applied to Number (student breakout groups—video not recorded)

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

[mitocw]

* NOTE: Lecture 14: New Methods Applied to Number (student breakout groups—video not recorded)

[martiangulele]

The fact that someone from Mozambique has access to an MIT lecture from the comfort of their couch is simply mind-blowing. By the way, I was surprised to hear that Professor Nancy has visited Mozambique! Anyways, thank you MIT for giving us access to high quality educational materials for free.

[fernandoochoaolivares]

Your work regarding Neurology is what got me into studying human brain, specifically since I was 15 years old, I started to study Psychiatry, know General Medicine it is the easy one, then after hearing Your talks, decided to focus on Neurology. I was misdiagnosed with bipolar, when I really had high functioning autism. Worked through therapy, mainly logotherapy, to improve speech, social phobia, and agoraphobia.

[alanklm]

It's amazing how little upvotes those lectures have, especially when you compare with other type of videos on youtube.
I believe comments help with, so I'm here just to say thank you very much! Give us more high quality content!

[oliveryuan]

Dear Professor, the claim that nobody had done the reverbs before is not true. Many years ago, I was an acoustic engineer and my field was architectural acoustics. Specifically, I was designing acoustic environment in a room for different purpose e.g. music, speech etc. One of the key properties we study is the reverberation time of the room and there many many measurements of different type of rooms and the fact that sound level decays has been very well known in the field of architectural acoustics. Just thought I’d point it out. Happy to offer more details if you are interested.

[sherry]

12:04 He asked about the "intensity or volume" and the answer was that it isn't well depicted on that graph. But I would have thought that the graph literally shows the overall loudness by how tall the squiggles are. They show the measured amplitude of the pressure wave at any given time, i.e. loudness/volume.

[carlosleninmajano]

Muchas gracias por habilitar los subtítulos en español. Un gran regalo para las personas de habla hispana no bilingües.

[fernandoochoaolivares]

For plasticity, I can think in other languages, such as English or Spanish. And read all day, programming in over 12 languages, I choose one for each day but focus on main project for the Industrial Workshop I work at. I cannot sleep much, I sleep from 7 hours to 9 hours, I am awake from 26 hours to 32 hours, then sleep. But I do love music.

[bloodypommelstudios]

Two random ideas off the top of my head about why the primary audio cortex might have two areas for high frequencies.

1. Backup/error detection. It would be evolutionary beneficial to still be able to hear if one side got damaged.

2. Each side might be subtly different, perhaps one side is close to being the true signal and the other is processed in some way. Some form of computation could take both these signals and use this to perform another function such as helping figure out sound direction or perform noise reduction to the signal to help us pick out the sound we're interested in.

[fernandoochoaolivares]

And hear sometimes over 3 blocks away, it kind of irritates me, but most of the time I deal with it fine. In night it just augments, so I hear music all the time, sometimes my brain filters insults or crass talking.

[williamjayaraj]

Thanks for the lecture on the hearing and speech. The study on the vowels and the consonants is very interesting. One falls on the vertical and the other on horizonal in the bar chart. Amazing. Thanks to Dr.Nancy Kan wisher and the MIT.

[neoepicurean]

I had to take a break at half way. I mean the brain is so amazing at carrying out these seemingly impossible tasks effortlessly... well, ironically, it's very hard to process that.

[harishravishankar]

wish I got a project with you to do some data analytic thing to prove a theory in neuro..

[blamedthegnome]

I wonder if the speech selective cortical region is still active for speech that contains phonemes that are not found in the language the individual speaks. I.e. does the brain detect as speech the clicks from Xhosa for example? Or whether there's a difference for voiced/unvoiced clicks. Or even if the context of seeing a person making those sounds increases activation.

[fernandoochoaolivares]

I mainly process regarding my own brain, in numbers not related to money or objects, also through images, I have autism and remember more than 25 years ago, I am 37 years old.

[yashwanthrao]

Very well put lecture although I can’t help myself from asking this question what essentially plays role in Choice of colors attributing to the specific Sounds stimuli is there a hidden psychoanalysis or is it just a random point of time choice 😅. Like the one depicts in Graphs !

[Rcarhar]

i closed my eyes and she walked around but i couldn't tell the difference at all lmao

[fernandoochoaolivares]

Correlation between input and how hearing impairment is done

[saurav]

Hey MIT, please upload other videos from the lecture the missing ones.

[Zalmoksis]

Funny thing, for me the reverb example sounds quite obviously like a train station announcement. An alien example, I guess, for Americans. (And totally not like a cathedral.)