eli5 How does the brain separate out frequencies it’s hearing so that we can make out different instruments in a song? It seems like some insanely complex analysis behind the scenes??
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Not a complete answer, but a significant portion of your brain is actually busy filtering all the “data” it gets from your senses. If it didn’t, you would constantly be overloaded with a lot of useless information. So a large part of what you see and hear isn’t actually preceived consciously. A by product of that is: for it to filter effectively, the brain needs a way to separate and categorise stuff, so it knows what to filte rout and what to keep in.
Coincidentally most “data” we receive from our senses has an intensity factor to it by ehich it can categorise stiff. Like how loud a sound is, or how fast it vibrates the air. How hot or cold a surface is. How many particles of a specific odor reach your nose.
I’m no neuroscientist, but I suspect it uses these diffwrent intensities to categorise it. Think of a sorting machine sorting objects by size. Bigge robjects go through bigfer chutes, smaller ibjects go through smaller chutes.
For your hearing: instead of the size, it measures how hard certain hairs in your ears vibrate. And instead of the chute it sends a stronger or weaker electrical pulse to your brain. Multiple sounds simply send multiple signals at once, and activate different braincells.
[I’ll scratch this parts if it turns out completely wrong.]
As for a fun side note from my personal life:
As someone diagnosed with aspergers, my brain is wired slightly differently than the avergae brain. I notice I’m more sensitive to sound in certain situations.
Rubbing together paper towels doesn’t really make much of sound, but I get an uncomfortable itch even from a fair distance away when someone uses a paper towel.
I also go to church and when we sing together I can still pick out many individual voices at once, and pinpont their exact origin. In a crowd of 400 I can still pick out about a dozen indivuals nearer to me. All while hearing the “crowd” sound and accompanying music as well. Not sure how rare this is, as I suspect conductors are often capable of this as well.
Side effect for me is that hanging around in crowds gets tiringvfor my brain and I often need some alone time after an hour or two. I also noticed that a few drinks of alcohol make this ability dissapear, which is handy when I want to hang around longer at parties.
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