That's a really good point. This may be telling us something more general about what the cerebral cortex is doing, too. For example, when people learn a new la

That's a really good point. This may be telling us something more general about what the cerebral cortex is doing, too. For example, when people learn a new language that involves phonemes very different from those of their native tongue, they often go through a phase where not only do they have difficulty producing the foreign sounds but have difficulty distinguishing sounds that would seem very different to a native speaker. For example, R and L are perceived as very similar to a native japanese speaker and the nasal vowels of french and portuguese are notoriously difficult for english speakers register. It could be that Wernicke's area (were language is supposedly processed) is really just specialized for processing complex sounds that we are very familiar with. So you'd expect a bird-watcher specialization effect from ... opera goers? safe crackers? sonar operators?