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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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Key-Lime-8851 t1_j0390p4 wrote

I wonder if they will do the same test on someone with moderate to severe dyslexia, curious if the neural cascade is completely different

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Mr_KittyC4tAtk t1_j04qhzz wrote

My wife has an auditory processing disability, similar to dyslexia but aural-based instead of written. I was just wondering what the implications of this would be in relation to her issues. Does her brain maybe not time-stamp the order?

Certainly interesting!

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kittyc4tatk t1_j04t8jz wrote

As his wife I definitely find this very interesting…cuz I’m sure that’s not how my brain works.

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SilkCondom t1_j07aeyq wrote

As his wife's boyfriend this will be valuable information, thanks

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DoctorCIS t1_j03h9tr wrote

I'd be interested to see if this discovery had any implications for auditory processing problems.

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final_draft_no42 t1_j03nbsf wrote

That what I would like to know. My brain seems to reshuffle things a bit. I’d like it to stop do that.

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MsMrSaturn t1_j03kq8c wrote

Reminds me a bit of Arrival where >! the aliens communicate by ink blotting out whole ideas at a time. !< Makes it seem like processing speech isn't necessarily linear.

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Vladius28 t1_j04iwnm wrote

Is that a fancy way of saying people hear the sounds in the order they were spoken? Would have never thought that

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trustych0rds t1_j037412 wrote

This sounds complicated and tiresome. I don't want to have to understand speech anymore. :(

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one_is_enough t1_j04kgnt wrote

I don’t understand. Our brains process sounds in the order they arrive? Do they get to publish a paper next week saying the same about vision? What am I missing here?

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Neat_Art9336 t1_j054dz4 wrote

The “what” was always known. It’s the “how” they researched.

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C-creepy-o t1_j096uwz wrote

Yeah but the how seems rather obvious. We hear certain syllables before other syllables we obviously don't hear sound before we hear sounds. And if are brain jumbled them up at any point it would be rather obvious with words like melon and lemon which seem like a super poor example given the syllabes themselves sound different and wouldn't sound the same jumbled up anyway.

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dandelion-17 t1_j041tv7 wrote

This is pretty cool!!! I work as a music therapist and a number of my clients have differences in auditory processing

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YouKnowHowIBe t1_j047ocw wrote

Can someone explain this to my 3 year old? She mixes those two words up constantly! Poor girl asks for waterlemon all the time

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Rugfiend t1_j0357z9 wrote

Can this explain 'aks somebody'?

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HaikusAreMyKink t1_j038j3v wrote

"Aks" is actually a legitimate word that's been around hundreds of years. It's not even just limited to AAVE, and the belief that it is is rooted in racism. Pretty interesting, actually!

Edit: White people getting triggered.

Edit 2: thank you, r/science patrons, for displaying your true colors so vividly. Very objective.

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Rugfiend t1_j039jhq wrote

Well, I'm Scottish - never once in 53 years heard someone say that outside of movie/TV/Snoop song/whatever. And... was a light-hearted comment in the first place. But thanks for the 'actually...' educational.

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Rugfiend t1_j039v81 wrote

Sorry, already triggered earlier, I'm sure that comment was unfair.

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sooprvylyn t1_j03e4pv wrote

Well, its not a legitimate word since its not included in any academically recognized standard dictionary.

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EchinusRosso t1_j03kyl2 wrote

Dictionaries don't legitimize words. They record use.

Source: https://www.outlookindia.com/international/-goblin-mode-becomes-oxford-dictionary-s-word-of-the-year-what-does-it-mean--news-242702

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sooprvylyn t1_j04qesv wrote

Yet they havent recorded the use of aks...weird that.

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EchinusRosso t1_j07ytg0 wrote

They have. It's often recorded as a dialectic pronunciation under the definition of "ask." It was literally used in Chaucer. The fact that you haven't looked doesn't mean records don't exist.

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sooprvylyn t1_j087gvp wrote

So then not a legitimate word but in some backwards uneducated areas people talk funny? Got it, means my assumption about those people has been correct this whole time.

Edit: also, chaucer isnt a good reference for the modern english language seeing as how its not the modern english language. His work is pretty much unintelligible to any modern english speaker. Might as well be referencing some archaic german writer.

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Illithid_Substances t1_j03nsko wrote

You know there was a time before dictionaries and words still existed?

Words aren't created by dictionaries, they're created by use

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sooprvylyn t1_j03o5zh wrote

Yeah, and then we codified language into a single resource to agree on spellings of words, definitions of words and the lexicon so that we could communicate as effectively as possible.

Can you use 'aks' in casual conversation? Sure, people may infer your education level though. Can you use aks in formal communication? I'd advise against it for the same reason.

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HaikusAreMyKink t1_j03syvp wrote

Tell me more about this "we" you speak of.

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sooprvylyn t1_j03wabs wrote

The royal "we" ... what an asinine reply. Like it or not the real world exists in convention, and you will be judged for violating convention. You dont have to care or get on board, but if you dont it WILL effect your life negatively.

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audesapere09 t1_j04au5w wrote

Not directly related, but I’ve always been curious about the brains of ancient Latin speakers because word order doesn’t matter.

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NoHalfPleasures t1_j0455ic wrote

This isn’t something I’ve ever thought about before but how that I have it makes me somewhat surprised that there isn’t a disorder of this mechanism that creates a “dyslexia” of hearing

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frenchmeister t1_j04dxi3 wrote

Auditory processing disorder might be related to it. For me it's mostly just a big delay between hearing words and understanding them, and I'm thinking that delay might be caused by the brain struggling to determine which noises came first or something.

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DopeDetective t1_j07bpku wrote

yeah I wouldn't be surprised if this is fairly common and the reason people will say "what?" first and then respond

I've also had a few times where I simply couldn't process what someone was saying & even after multiple tries it still sounded like gibberish to me.

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IRMacGuyver t1_j04ocgi wrote

Is there a brain defect that would explain this not working right and generating gibberish? I've had "hearing trouble" since I was a baby. I can hear just fine when tested but as I've gotten older I've realized often I hear gibberish and have to ask people to repeat themselves. I wonder if there's some defect that's been in my brain this whole time that would even explain why I didn't respond to voices as an infant. It's not like I have autism though so it's not that. Is there anyone I could contact to get tested? I know it'd require an MRI but I figure if these people are doing studies on it maybe they'd want to see me for free.

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AnonymousWingnut t1_j051cyo wrote

“…providing insight into what intermediary representations exist between the sensory input and sub-lexical units.”

For the “why is this interesting?”/“didn’t we already know this?” question: the title is an oversimplification. Yes, we know we hear sounds in sequence. The above quote from the abstract shows why it’s published in Nature—it’s a finding at the intersection between perception (the physical act of hearing sounds) and representation (knowing what those sounds mean and translating them into ‘mental images’). I.e., how do we translate arbitrary sounds/symbols into meaning in the mind?

We know a lot about both, but the task of scientists like these is to figure out how we get from perception to magic brain pictures. This is a step towards understanding that phenomenon.

Also, MEG is new-ish in psychological research (not really, but relative to other techniques. Plus it’s $$$ so there isn’t a ton of it. Again, relative) so it’s deserved attention. When we find the same thing we knew before, but with newer, better technology, it’s always good news. Converging evidence

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BarKeep717 t1_j05olaz wrote

I can recall time stamps

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thewiltedpussy t1_j05zz8k wrote

Can someone eli5 this, I’m stoopid :-(

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nadmaximus t1_j067k62 wrote

I think this feels obvious to people, but consider that this is not the only way that it could be.

In terms of unmasking the "algorithm" of the processing, this is an interesting question, even though we are certain that we process words in order. But how do we do it?

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kuchenrolle t1_j07s9z6 wrote

>Having demonstrated that the brain processes multiple speech sounds at the same time, the next question is: How does the brain do this without mixing up the phonetic features of these speech sounds? There are a number of potential computational solutions to this problem. One is position-specific encoding, which posits that phonetic features are represented differently depending on where the phoneme occurs in a word. This coding scheme uses a different neural pattern to encode information about the first phoneme position (P1), second phoneme position (P2), etc., resulting in no representational overlap between neighbouring speech sounds.
>
>To test whether the brain uses this coding scheme, we trained a decoder on the responses to phonemes in first position and evaluated the model’s generalisation to other phoneme positions (Fig. 2C). Contra to the predictions of a position-dependent coding scheme, we found significant generalisation from one phoneme position to another. A classifier trained on P1 significantly generalised to the pattern of responses evoked by P2, P3, P-1 and P-2 from 20 to 270 ms (p < 0.001; t = 3.3), with comparable performance (max variance for P2 = 26%, SEM = 4%; P3 = 32%, SEM = 3%; P-1 = 23%, SEM = 3%, P-2 = 37%, SEM = 4%). This result contradicts a purely position-specific encoding scheme, and instead supports the existence of a position-invariant representation of phonetic features.
>
>Interestingly, training and testing on the same phoneme position (P1) yielded the strongest decodability (max = 71%, SEM = 5%), which was significantly stronger than when generalising across positions (e.g. train P1 test P1 vs. train on P1 test on P2: 110:310 ms, p = 0.006). It is unclear whether this gain in performance is indicative of position-specific encoding in addition to invariant encoding, or whether it reflects bolstered similarity between train and test signals due to matching other distributional features. Future studies could seek to match extraneous sources of variance across phoneme positions to test this explicitly.

That's an original way of interpreting their findings. Could they think any more symbolically?

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FetusDrive t1_j04qzu3 wrote

Sounds like we are getting closer to understanding consciousness.

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davidmlewisjr t1_j05fnie wrote

Is it possible that there are scientists that fail to understand the basic nature of time… as in stream of consciousness sort of stuff…

Cause and effect…

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djdefenda t1_j05h2cn wrote

Is it something to do with people using an 'L' at the start of the word instead of an 'M?'

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