Study shows how our brains sync hearing with vision News
To make sense of complex environments, brain waves constantly adapt, compensating for drastically different sound and vision processing speeds
Every high-school physics student learns that sound and light travel at very different speeds. If the brain did not account for this difference, it would be much harder for us to tell where sounds came from, and how they are related to what we see.
Instead, the brain allows us to make better sense of our world by playing tricks, so that a visual and a sound created at the same time are perceived as synchronous, even though they reach the brain and are processed by neural circuits at different speeds.
To make sense of complex environments, brain waves constantly adapt, compensating for drastically different sound and vision processing speeds, researchers report.
Every high-school physics student learns that sound and light travel at very different speeds. If the brain did not account for this difference, it would be much harder for us to tell where sounds came from, and how they are related to what we see.
Instead, the brain allows us to make better sense of our world by playing tricks, so that a visual and a sound created at the same time are perceived as synchronous, even though they reach the brain and are processed by neural circuits at different speeds.
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Every high-school physics student learns that sound and light travel at very different speeds. If the brain did not account for this difference, it would be much harder for us to tell where sounds came from, and how they are related to what we see.
Instead, the brain allows us to make better sense of our world by playing tricks, so that a visual and a sound created at the same time are perceived as synchronous, even though they reach the brain and are processed by neural circuits at different speeds.
One of the brain s tricks is temporal recalibration: altering our sense of time to synchronize our joint perception of sound and vision. A new study finds that recalibration depends on brain signals constantly adapting to our environment to sample, order and associate competing sensory inputs together.
Maurice is six.
He accomplished his feat just in time for Pi Day: Sunday, March 14 (3/14, get it?).
It all began when the family wanted to make a pie.
â âCause we were trying to find stovetop pie,â Maurice said.
âOur oven was busted,â explained his father, Phil Dickinson, âso we wanted to see whether we could make pie on the stovetop. We went looking on the internet and we came across the number pi.â
Pi, you may recall, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. If you divide the circumference of any circle by the diameter, you get pi, an infinite number that begins with 3.14 and ends whenever you get tired.