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EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams
- runtime_lens 3mo ago[flagged]
- noelwelsh 3mo agoAbsolutely. Take a look at "unconscious perception".
- Lomlioto 3mo agoI def process more than I want. Its def a spectrum. In the easiest look at people like me who complain very quick if something is wrong like to warm to cold to sweaty etc. and others not even ackknowliding it at all
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- skor 3mo agoparents tend to yell at the same time and it needs simultaneous processing
- eurekin 3mo agoAlso explains why we like music with two simultaneous distinct sections (bass + the rest). One without the other doesn't feel as complete
- junon 3mo agoThis is a completely different phenomenon. Your ear/brain are tuned to rhythmic beats in the lower frequencies (footsteps). We're better at pattern recognition with the lower frequencies. Also, our brains will encode the differences in registers to evoke emotion differently, which is often used by horror films to make a scene scarier[0]. Evolutionarily this is probably to detect screams or babies crying, a rustling bush, etc. Speech encoding, at least per this article, has little to do with that. We don't have music encoding so much as we have pattern recognition, instinctual emotional respond to sound, etc. Another great video about how music is perceived in animals is [1], just while we're on the topic. [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-hidden-sounds-of-horror-movie-soundtracks-freak-you-out https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-hidden-sounds-... [1] https://youtu.be/0ZYhyewNQMo?is=0mWSRAzObOD2p32E https://youtu.be/0ZYhyewNQMo?is=0mWSRAzObOD2p32E
- vanderZwan 3mo agoYour example is needlessly bleak, but in general: yes, we're a social species and being able to process multiple speech streams seems obviously pretty important in many social contexts involving more than two people.
- dboreham 3mo agoSeems doubtful to me that there will be any hardware in our species specific to processing language. It's going to be the same basic hardware as Chimps. Whatever is going on that's related to us being a social species is all software.
- vanderZwan 3mo agoUh, there definitely is "hardware specific to processing language" for our species, they even have their own wiki pages[0][1]. And in general our brains differ significantly from that of a chimpansee. Human brains push neuron density to to absolute limit within the animal kingdom and have unique evolutionary adaptations that allow for it. As a result our species also has mental health disorders unique to us that seem to be cause by the neurons being pushed past that limit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
- awestroke 3mo agoThis is maybe only tangentially relevant to the linked study, but I've noticed I can read aloud from a book on autopilot while thinking about other things or even thinking back on past conversations. I could not do this a few years ago, but now it happens on its own. I wonder how that relates to attention and speech streams
- m12k 3mo agoI experienced this too, when I started reading out loud more. At first, it was just that my eyes would scan ahead a bit from what I was saying, to help me get the right emphasis by knowing where the sentence was going. It felt like I had "handed off" saying the words out loud to a "subroutine", so my attention could be on what I was reading. Then that "readahead" extended to a whole sentence. And at that point it was like I was so far ahead of what I was saying that I had time to think about it a bit. And then at some point it was like the "reading the words" part got handed off to a "subroutine" too, so my attention could mostly stay on whatever I was thinking
- surfsvammel 3mo agoThis is something that has been studied and is apparently more common when reading out loud. I have this as well. I can read to my kids and at the same time plan the upcoming day. Pretty neat!
- runtime_lens 3mo ago[flagged]
- baxtr 3mo agoSometimes I read a book out loud and think about something completely different. I wonder if reading aloud might be like walking. I can be walking and speaking to a person at the same time.
- Perz1val 3mo agoNot reading out loud, but I've caught myself a few times on reading and not processing that, because I was thinking about something else. Like I still did the reading, but straight to /dev/null of my brain
- subhro 3mo agoAs a pilot and a radio officer, I have always been able to process and service 2 audio streams simultaneously. So not surprised with this finding.
- junon 3mo agoPerhaps a dumb question but are they center panned (or mono, i.e. talking over each other) or is it split left ear/right ear when they come through the headset?
- sigmoid10 3mo agoAirplane radios are generally broadcasting and receiving mono. There are modern headsets that can also play stereo, but only for onboard music or intercom purposes, if the plane supports it. But in planes with 2 radios you can usually configure their I/O individually. So you can listen (and also talk, although that makes sense less often) on two frequencies at the same time.
- junon 3mo agoYes of course, the transmitted audio would be mono. I meant one radio in one ear and another radio in the other ear, or if you mix them and they both play in both ears. But it sounds like they're mixed (talking over each other in a single audio stream).
- sigmoid10 3mo agoYes. I have never seen any system (planes or elsewhere) that splits multiple voice communication inputs so you hear different streams in different ears. How would that be different (let alone better) than having both streams in both ears? It's not like your brain can process each ear separately.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- t23414321 3mo agoThen it is known that if you play to someone with small delay what he says he will be lost on both - so he can't think about and listen to what he is saying if it's not one stream.
- cheschire 3mo agoSupported by the empirical evidence of cube farms, post COVID in the early “return to office” days, when office etiquette was completely forgotten and people were listening to all their meetings on speaker, but we were still having all our meetings at our desks. I would constantly hear people around the cube farm stumbling through sentences because they could hear themselves through a neighbors computer with a slight delay.
- j45 3mo agoThe DJ is explained.
- thenthenthen 3mo agoMany dj mixers offer the option to split the main mix to one ear and the cue’d track to the other, i have never been able to mix like that, only with cue on headphones and main mix out in the room/monitors. Weird
- j45 3mo agoEveryone can be different and that's ok. I know dj's who can rarely hear the song that's currently playing, and only hear all the other songs that can play with it. Experiencing music is the gift :)
- dr_dshiv 3mo ago“Bilocation” was one of the legendary superpowers of Pythagoras (he was miraculously able to lecture in two cities at the same time). Whenever I’m in multiple conversations at once in a social setting, I think of Pythagoras
- latentframe 3mo agoThe simultaneous neural representation is very interesting result here
- lokimedes 3mo agoMany mindfulness practices seem to direct attention at two place at once, to quiet the inner voice. Perhaps this relates to more than just speech, but to attention itself. George Gurdjieff's "The Fourth Way" deals with self remembering, and his pupil, P. D. Ouspensky, has a very vivid description in [1] of how focusing on two things at once leads to a changed state of consciousness, that seems like meditation, and comes from the saturation of the two streams of attention. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Miraculous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Miraculous
- Gehinnn 3mo agoI believe this is why fugues are such a pleasure to listen to!
- kortex 3mo agoOne of the first ways I learned to meditate/access different states of mind was a technique described as "overload trance" (IIRC). The premise was, listen to a piece of music, focusing on one musical component, then while keeping that focus, add another element, and another, etc. It works best with pieces with a lot of ostinato (repetition/vamp) and Bach's Little Fugue in G minor was and is one of my favorites. Really fun to play too, though i get tripped up as soon as the feet get involved. Also, Utopia by Astral Projection (that whole album Trust in Trance 3 is great for this). Bonus points to mentally visualizing something in time with the music (I like orbs whirling around like atomic orbitals). You can really tie up much of your mental processing this way and I find it much easier than traditional zen meditation, trying to bring focus back to eg. breathing. Little fugue: https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4 https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4 Trust in trance 3 playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mHhgZDphEanJgP6zSzFS0pQ7mMWW-tiBg https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mHhgZDphEanJgP6zSz...
- broccoluvr 3mo agoyou guys telling me you still listening to only 1 podcast at the time?
- BetterThanSober 3mo agoLeft ear: Mozart, right ear: The Bible in Chinese
- londons_explore 3mo agoListening to two talkers at a time is certainly doable... As is talking whilst listening to another conversation - eg. Giving a lecture whilst eves dropping on the people talking at the back of the lecture theatre. However, having a two way conversation with one person whilst listening to another is really hard. Not sure why.
- gleenn 3mo agoListening and responding are likely pretty different mental activities
- MomsAVoxell 3mo agoI'm a native English speaking pinball freak living as an expat in a German-speaking country, and I find myself often listening to English speakers on the train, while also carrying on a conversation in German .. and I have observed that the same part of my mind that can handle multi ball-pinball events, where during a pinball session multiple balls are in play, 'feels' active. Its a kind of context juggling mechanism in both cases, and it feels like the same mental muscle being exercised in both cases. I wonder if there is a worthwhile experiment to be conducted wherein an EEG'ed pinball player gets to play pinball with easy multi ball targets, while also listening to German and English speakers, and then passing a test at the end of it .. because I sure have been preparing for that kind of scenario lately ..
- taneq 3mo agoYou're using one of the streams for yourself. :P
- jimbob45 3mo agoIf you can listen to someone play the piano with two hands, it’s a short hop to get to speech.
- dboreham 3mo agoNot really (except perhaps if it's Stockhausen they're playing). A piece of music played with two hands is still one coherent information stream.
- thelastgallon 3mo ago"humans have only one language processor" -- this is what I remember from Patrick Henry Winstons lecture
- coldtea 3mo agoAsync-programming style single-core concurrency would still look like parallelism to an outside observer :)
- moezd 3mo agoYes, and you can also write two different sentences using two different pens in your hands.
- jvvw 3mo agoWhen my son was about 4 or 5 he used to draw pictures with pens in both hands simultaneously which I was always amazed he could do!
- markdown 3mo agoWhen I was an infant I'd waddle through my mothers garden to my favourite fruit tree... a chilly bush. I'd pick the red chillies and eat them with gusto. My mouth would turn red but that didn't bother me. These were very hot chillies that my parents couldn't eat even when they were green. Sadly, I lost that super power at some point. I love a spicy curry, but I don't think I'd make it through a Hot Ones episode as a guest. Does your son still have his ability?
- huflungdung 3mo ago[dead]
- xamuel 3mo agoAnd you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matter how much I practiced it, I was never able to get to where it would take place automatically without my forcing it.
- DrScientist 3mo agoIf you couldn't process multiple streams ( audio/visual/other senses ) how would you ever be able to monitor the background for danger and context switch? There is a difference between conscious experience and what's going on in the background.
- coldtea 3mo agoThis is about multiple speech streams. More specific from the mere ability to process multiple sensory streams in general.
- DrScientist 3mo agoSure. Still don't see why the result is at all surprising. If you couldn't process multiple streams ( I see nothing special about speech - note parsing speech is potentially different from thinking over the top - ie the difference between hearing and listening ) simultaneously it's hard to see how you'd last 5 minutes.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- avianlyric 3mo agoThere’s a big difference between processing multiple streams, and processing multiple streams simultaneously. You can achieve the former, without the latter, by doing time slicing. Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads. Proving the brain is continuously processing and encoding multiple streams simultaneously is an interesting finding that helps us better understand how our brains handle multitasking. That’s absolutely something worth studying and understanding, even if the headline discovery “feels” obvious. It the precise mechanism that’s interesting, not the effect the mechanism produces.
- gala8y 3mo agoWhen I meditated a lot, I was able to sit in a cafe and listen to 3 conversations without switching and be able to understand them and remember them all. It happened to me few times. Also, once, sleeping in a tent, a voice from a dream interfered with sound of raindrops and became distorted and I woke up scared only to quickly get what just happened.
- throwawaysjskdk 3mo agoyep, my wife does this routinely
- vanderZwan 3mo agoCome on guys, the contribution of the research is that it made measurements of how the processing of multiple inputs is represented in EEGs, not whether or not we can handle multiple inputs. Stop acting snarky, it just shows you didn't read beyond the headline.
- alkyon 3mo agoThe same is true for music, otherwise canons and polyphony wouldn't work.
- tgv 3mo agoThat's not a good argument. First, music is not speech. It doesn't require linguistic processing. Second, you can hear chords instead of individual voices, so polyphony can be perceived as shifting harmony, and it usually is.
- alkyon 3mo agoIt's incorrect to reduce polyphony to just shifting harmonies. Harmony is of course the constraint but the whole point is about intertwined voices - various melodies that your brain can process simultaneously. Music is not speech, but it's not that far from the language as it seems in terms of processing. When you hear 2 melodic lines at the same time, you're brain needs to encode them separately, in a similar manner to parallel speech streams.
- tgv 3mo agoThe argument is not about "is polyphony shifting harmony" but about "does the brain encode two or more separate signals for polyphonic music." There's nothing that prevents the brain from encoding the whole thing in one stream, and taking that apart at a later stage. E.g., it might code music like "G3 over F, F3 over F, Em, A3 over Em, B3 over Em, C#4 over A7, etc." It's not that it has to be like this, just that a mere theoretical argument cannot exclude it. And even then, musical perception has basically no relation to language processing.
- alkyon 3mo agoI'm not so sure it's just perception involved. You're going along a street and can hear a violin playing. A melody develops, you establish a sense of tonality, can predict next sounds maybe. And then you also make out a recorder. Another piece, totally unrelated harmonically. Another stream to process, I would assume a brain can handle it (at least a musical one should). I agree that language processing is different, but some similarities do exist.
- nttylock 3mo ago[flagged]
- a_gopher 3mo agoIf reading aloud a children story, you may notice you are able to maintain an independent unrelated train of thought. While doing so, I notice that occasionally extra mistakes can "leak" into the story telling - e.g. you read a single word incorrectly, maybe substituting a word from your other train of thought.
- Neil44 3mo agoYeah it's like I suddenly realise I haven't been thinking about the reading and I'm near the bottom of the next page somehow.
- barrenko 3mo agoInterlinked.
- Marciplan 3mo agoor any other reading for that matter!
- _ink_ 3mo agoI definitely cannot do that. Crazy.
- bell-cot 3mo agoThe ability may take time to develop. If you have a couple under-5 children handy, who'd love the ritual of having the same ultra-simplistic and repetitive books read to them every night, night after night after night, when your head is probably full of grownup stuff that you gotta get done...
- Muhammad523 3mo agoI can do that, and i notice that i kinda stop thinking about the reading and put more "brain resources" into the independent train of thought. Then i realize i was reading all the time without putting any effort in it
- thedanbob 3mo agoWhen I was a kid, my dad (a physicist) would often read stories to me and my brother. He would sometimes fall asleep while reading, and we could tell when that was coming because suddenly our children's story would stop making sense and get filled with all these big physics terms.
- ChrisRR 3mo agoI had assumed this was already well known. My issue is that I can't stop processing other speech streams. It seems other people can tune out conversations around them when talking to a person but I have to hear every word
- bitwize 3mo agoMy wife's brain could probably do that. I'm not so sure about mine.
- mulhoon 3mo agoAnecdotally, I have 3 young kids who sometimes all talk to me at once. It's impossible to process, but with 2, I've noticed it IS kinda possible process.
- saidnooneever 3mo agoask any dj who doesnt use modern sync tools and they will tell u, u can follow 2 entire songs out of sync of eachother fine, it takes practice but your brain can get used to these kinda tasks. (ofc very unscientific here :D)
- shtack 3mo agoI’ve actually found that I’m able to process two speech streams and one music stream independently from those. At least for me, music seems to have a dedicated sub-processor of sorts.
- NalNezumi 3mo agoRelated, but this reminds me of the story by Richard Feynman [1] when he practices counting up to 60 seconds in his head, and after many experiments around what he can do simultaneously conclude that he can simultaneously count and read but not speak. Later sharing this to John Tukey, he's told that Tukey can't read while counting but could speak while counting. Turns out Tukey is visualizing looking at a tape, while he counts, while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself, so he couldn't speak while counting but Tukey couldn't read while counting >By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads. when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for different people. And we discovered that you can externally and objectively test how the brain works: you don't have to ask a person how he counts and rely on his ownobservations of him-self; instead, you observe what he can and can't do while he counts. The test is absolute. There's no way to beat it; no way to fake it. >It's natural to explain an idea in terms of what you already have in your head. Concepts are piled on top of each other; this idea is taught in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in terms of another idea, which comes from count- ing, which can be so different for different people! >I often think about that, especially when I'm teaching some esoteric technique such as integrat- ing Bessel functions. When I see equations, I see the letters in colors-I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel func- tions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light- tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students. [1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf
- hoppp 3mo agoI can also count while reading, I just tried it. But I can't write while counting. I can have one interpretation and one generative task running at the same time.
- BetterThanSober 3mo agoI can count while reading and it's fairly easy The sentence below will be written when I'm counting to 60 Let me try counting while writing, it's hard with tons of mistakes and typo (like switching count with write), it's also demonstrably slower with this whole sentence taking more that 60 count. Verbalizing the count is way harder and I need frequent stops to gather my thoughts
- adverbly 3mo agoI wonder if parallel processing is related to musical training or ability. I've always been jealous of people who can play the drums and sing or play piano with both hands and a foot while singing.
- davidmurdoch 3mo agoI can do the music part just fine. But listening to two conversations at the same time just means I understand neither of them.
- chrisbrandow 3mo agoFamously, the Apollo Mission control team learned to handle multiple conversations stream simultaneously. The side effect was that going to cocktail parties was a nightmare, because they couldn’t turn it off.
- wellthisisgreat 3mo agothat's fascinating. Do you have any link to this tidbit?
- aidenn0 3mo agoDinners with my extended family are like this (everybody talking at the same time, most people participating in two simultaneous conversations). After moving away for college, my sister would not talk during dinners when visiting because she found it took her weeks to get back out of the habit again.
- vanderZwan 3mo agoAirport controllers (and similar positions for trains and metros) probably also suffer from this then
- SwtCyber 3mo agoThis seems potentially useful for attention-steered hearing aids. A system that waits for complete disengagement from the old speaker may react too slowly
- ivanstepanovftw 3mo agoOf course, because we have two ears.
- mrbnprck 3mo agoHumans are born with two ears anyways, right?
- fortran77 3mo agoI do a form of this all the time and I've always wondered "how." I can copy Morse Code--hearing the code and writing it down--while carrying on a conversation with someone else. I'm only "encoding" it, in that I have to read it to know what I just copied. The process of hearing a letter or word in Morse and moving my hand to write it has become so automatic that I can do it while having a live conversation with someone in the room. It would be interesting to know what's going on in my head with an EEG or FMRI...
- alexpotato 3mo agoThere is an interesting point about this from animation. Imagine you are seeing a pendulum clock and it makes a "tick" on one extreme and "tock" on the other. When they first started doing animation + sound they noticed that if you play the "tock" sound at the exact same time the pendulum hit the extreme, people would think it was delayed. Research showed that humans required a small amount of time to "context switch" from one stimulus to another. I think it's about 1/16th of a second. Some interesting other observations about time perception here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception
- dboreham 3mo agoI read the paper's abstract. They're not actually claiming what commenters here think they are. They're saying that there's some sort of pipeline processing for the task of "listening to speech" and when the subject switches focus from listening to one speaker to another, that pipeline has to drain. And the new stream pipeline has to get loaded up. Not actually surprising when you think about how it would have to work. The same thing likely happens with vision.
- seoulbigchris 3mo agoI knew a few ham radio guys who could copy Morse code at greater than 20 WPM and simultaneously carry on a conversation.
- Qem 3mo agoEchoes of the bicameral mind[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
- pxc 3mo agoWhen I used to go to parties in college, I was known within my friend group for participating in multiple conversations at once, flitting from one group to another. One of my friends later told me he thought it was impressive, but in fact I just couldn't help but hear all of the conversations at once, and if multiple groups were talking about interesting things, I would find myself torn between them, and end up bouncing back and forth.
- bironran 3mo agoAnecdotal: A long time ago, in my 20's, I found out it's easy for me to think in two streams as long as they operated in different languages. I could talk to my colleagues in Hebrew and answer emails in English at the same time. Surprisingly, writing and speaking in the same language is not as easy for me. Possible, but requires some mental effort to keep the buffers separated.
- oggreen 3mo agoFindings like these surprise me. I had a NDE a few years ago and my observation was such that everything slowed down tremendously and I was able to process every instant like it was slow motion. This wasn't like a "metaphysical" thing. I could recall the entire trip in the ambulance, every moment seemed like it was minutes. We have so many "hacks" that the brain encodes to do the least work possible that I don't know if we could ever truly know what the brain would be capable of.
- _doctor_love 3mo agoStuff like this is what makes me not worry about AI overtaking humanity. The human brain + mind is so sophisticated, we have no idea what untapped potential still remains. And anecdotally, this headline feels like it's confirming something already well-known. I once did a presentation for a software team visiting the US from South Korea and their translator was real-time translating my words into Korean for them. The translator had an earpiece in and so did the clients. Once I adjusted to it, it became very natural to present and interact this way (but it was certainly weird at first).