Brain Understands One Voice in Noisy Environments, New Study Finds

Brain examination ( via Getty)
Brain examination ( via Getty)
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Brain Understands One Voice in Noisy Environments, New Study Finds

Brain examination ( via Getty)
Brain examination ( via Getty)

In a crowded room where many people are talking, such as a family birthday party or busy restaurant, our brains have the ability to focus our attention on a single speaker.

Understanding this scenario and how the brain processes stimuli like speech, language, and music has been the research focus of Edmund Lalor, associate professor of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Recently, his lab found a new clue into how the brain is able to unpack this information and intentionally hear one speaker, while weaning out or ignoring a different speaker. The researchers also found brain is actually taking an extra step to understand the words coming from the speaker being listened to, and not taking that step with the other words swirling around the conversation.

"Our findings suggest that the acoustics of both the attended story and the unattended or ignored story are processed similarly. But we found there was a clear distinction between what happened next in the brain,” said Lalor.

For this study, recently published in The Journal of Neuroscience, participants simultaneously listened to two stories, but were asked to focus their attention on only one. Using EEG brainwave recordings, the researchers found the story that participants were instructed to pay attention to was converted into linguistic units known as phonemes, which are units of sound that can distinguish one word from another -- while the other story was not.

"That conversion is the first step towards understanding the attended story. Sounds need to be recognized as corresponding to specific linguistic categories like phonemes and syllables, so that we can ultimately determine what words are being spoken -- even if they sound different -- for example, spoken by people with different accents or different voice pitches," Lalor said.



Kamchatka Quake May Have Caused Volcano’s Eruption After 600 Years, Russia Says

Group of volcanoes of Klyuchevskoy, Russia. (AFP)
Group of volcanoes of Klyuchevskoy, Russia. (AFP)
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Kamchatka Quake May Have Caused Volcano’s Eruption After 600 Years, Russia Says

Group of volcanoes of Klyuchevskoy, Russia. (AFP)
Group of volcanoes of Klyuchevskoy, Russia. (AFP)

The overnight eruption of the Krasheninnikov Volcano in Kamchatka, its first in 600 years, may be connected to the huge earthquake that rocked Russia's Far East last week, Russia's RIA state news agency and scientists reported on Sunday.

"This is the first historically confirmed eruption of Krasheninnikov Volcano in 600 years," RIA cited Olga Girina, head of the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team, as saying.

She added that the eruption may be connected to the earthquake on Wednesday that triggered tsunami warnings as far away as French Polynesia and Chile, and was followed by an eruption of Klyuchevskoy, the most active volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

On the Telegram channel of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, Girina said that Krasheninnikov's last lava effusion took place on 1463 - plus/minus 40 years - and no eruption has been known since.

The Kamchatka branch of Russia's ministry for emergency services said that an ash plume rising up to 6,000 meters (3.7 miles) has been recorded following the volcano's eruption. The volcano itself stands at 1,856 meters.

"The ash cloud has drifted eastward, toward the Pacific Ocean. There are no populated areas along its path," the ministry said on Telegram.

The eruption of the volcano has been assigned an orange aviation code, indicating a heightened risk to aircraft, the ministry said.