Our Brains ‘Time-Stamp’ Sounds to Process the Words We Hear

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“To understand speech, your brain needs to accurately interpret both the speech sounds’ identity and the order that they were uttered to correctly recognize the words being said,” explains Laura Gwilliams, 

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“We show how the brain achieves this feat: Different sounds are responded to with different neural populations. And, each sound is time-stamped with how much time has gone by since it entered the ear. This allows the listener to know both the order and the identity of the sounds that someone is saying to correctly figure out what words the person is saying.” 

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This allows the listener to know both the order and the identity of the sounds that someone is saying to correctly figure out what words the person is saying.” 

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While the brain’s role in processing individual sounds has been well-researched, there is much we don’t know about how we manage the fast auditory sequences that constitute speech.  

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Additional understanding of the brain’s dynamics can potentially lead to addressing neurological afflictions that diminish our ability to understand the spoken word. 

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The researchers found that the brain processes speech using a buffer, thereby maintaining a running representation—i.e., time-stamping—of the past three speech sounds 

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“We found that each speech sound initiates a cascade of neurons firing in different places in the auditory cortex,” explains Gwilliams 

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“This means that the information about each individual sound in the phonetic word ‘k-a-t’ gets passed between different neural populations in a predictable way, which serves to time-stamp each sound with its relative order.” 

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