We can also pick up on additional info, without having to see the speaker, purely from the voice. E.g. Why is it that we can almost immediately pick up a complete stranger’s approximate age just from hearing them speak a few sentences?
In: Biology
We’re not. It takes a couple of seconds to build a voice profile. Think of anytime you make a phone call. The first couple of words are very important. If someone says hello to you, you usually respond with a “hello” and other pleasantries. Theae familiar words allows the brain to understand and then decode the rest of the message. If the person in the other end forgoes the pleasantries then there is often a couple of seconds of confusion as you’re not quite sure what they are saying.
Survival, can you identify the voices of the people in your tribal settlement, if you hear an unknown voice they are a stranger and possibly a threat.
Something that no one has mentioned: while human hearing sucks in many ways compared to other animals, one part where it’s really good at is discerning similar but different frequencies of sound, meaning we can better pick out some sound cues like different inflection patterns, resonance/harmonics, etc.
And our brain is very attuned to these sounds, with the part of the brain that processes verbal communication (Wernicke’s area) being much larger than in other animals.
These cues tell you not just about who the person is (mainly age, gender, constitution), but also emotional state, health, etc. And you can also create a mental model of specific people so you can recognize different people with similar physical characteristics (you can recognize different people’s voices even if they’re the same age, gender and size).
Our brains are highly tuned to vocal nuances, which helps us pick up on subtle cues like age, emotion, and even health from just a few sentences.
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