THE MECHANICS OF PERCEPTION & SENSATION

AUDITORY SYSTEM




FATIN INSYIRAH &
DAYANG NUR LIYANA
What is the difference between hearing and listening?

Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that has not suffered
some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for
hundreds of millions of years.
It is your lifeline, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on
your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are
leaping into your ears every 50,000th of a second and pathways in your brain
are just waiting to interrupt your focus.
Listening is a skill that we are in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction
and information overload.
And yet we dare not lose it. Because listening tunes our brain to the patterns of
our environment faster than any other sense, and paying attention to the non-
visual parts of our world feeds into everything from our intellectual sharpness to
our dance skills.






HEARING

Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a
place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they
look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the
same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second
per event.
But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full
second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head
towards it, recognise it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or
sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.
This is because hearing has evolved as our alarm system it operates out of
line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no
place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved
a complex and automatic "volume control", fine-tuned by development and
experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might
be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere
within the kilometre or so that your ears can detect.


LISTENING

This is where attention kicks in.
Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention,
and they use different parts of the brain.
The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A
chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a
defensive response in a mere tenth of a second elevating your heart rate, hunching
your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to
pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and
has been observed in every studied vertebrate.
More complex attention kicks in when you hear your name called from across a room or
hear an unexpected bird call from inside an underground station. This stimulus-directed
attention is controlled by pathways through the temporoparietal and inferior frontal
cortex regions, mostly in the right hemisphere areas that process the raw, sensory
input but do not concern themselves with what you should make of that sound.
(Neuroscientists call this a "bottom-up" response.)
But when you actually pay attention to something you are listening to, whether it is
your favourite song or the cat meowing at dinner time, a separate "top-down" pathway
comes into play. Here, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your
cortex, part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on
what you are hearing and tune out sights and sounds that are not as immediately
important.
In this case, your brain works like a set of noise-suppressing headphones, with the
bottom-up pathways acting as a switch to interrupt if something more urgent grabs
your attention.