Cool Beans
Aug 21st, 2008 at 3:34 pm by Susie
Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see.
Here’s the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a “higher cognitive” producer, like the brain’s superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences.
The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear.
The study was published last week in the journal BMC Neuroscience.
Hmm. Interesting.
I see what you are saying.
No surprise to me. Over the past decade, I’ve been teaching myself several foreign languages and, besides the fact that it is damn hard to do, one key thing I’ve noticed is that until I’ve gained considerable proficiency, I absolutely, positively, have to be watching the speakers in order to hear (understand, comprehend) the words. In fact, the best indication that I have made real progress is when I can hear and understand something on TV in that language when I am not watching.
That’s what I thought, having always needed to have my glasses on to hear, or at least process, certain things better (great hearing, darn near legally blind).
And as for “cinematic” experience, consider how well movie scores can work that are more or less just sound cue fragments, rather than emotive pieces, like maybe some of Thomas Newman’s scores.