New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations | Hacker News Reader

New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

wsj.com

62 pointsuptown35 comments

One interesting phenomenon I once noticed was my own ability to combine lip reading and auditory performance.

I was at a basketball game, on the 2nd level, and of course could not hear what was happening on the bench due to crowd noise. But when I watched the coach through binoculars, suddenly I could hear what she was saying. I'd never have guessed I had any ability to lip-read whatsoever, but I was blown away by my brain's ability in that regard.

This is closely related to the McGurk effect [0], which deals with our perception when the audio of one sound is shown with video of another sound being produced.

The canonical example of this is a video of saying /ga/ combined with the audio of saying /ba/ tends to produce the perception of hearing /da/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw

When I was little I would watch the news with the volume turned off, then I'd try to lip read. I found that I could do very well as long as I could guess the context (usually by guessing from the associated picture they'd show next to the person). Yours might be the same effect.

I actually got annoyed at my roommate last night because he was washing dishes while I was trying to watch a movie. The sound of running water totally messed up my ability to understand the movie (unless I turned up the volume quite a bit, and we have neighbors...), so I had to pause it until he was done.

I always thought it was just me - I'm not a native speaker - but it's interesting to know that it's an actual medical condition.

I'm not convinced that I suffer from this but for years now I've enabled subtitles/captions in order to follow along. Helps with ambient noise, accents in the dialogue, otherwise inaudible dialogue, plus sometimes there's interesting ad-libs/changes from original script.

Might not help for a non-native English speaker unless the titles are in your language though, YMMV.

I do this too, a habit picked up when my kids were little and I didn't want to wake them up with loud movies. I'm surprised now, when I turn captions off, how much harder I have to concentrate on what I'm watching in order to keep track of what's going on.

I have the opposite problem. Whether voice+caps are in my language, or the caps are a translation to my native language with a spoken (foreign) language that I understand fine, I CANNOT stop myself from reading every word of the captions, so it really limits my enjoyment of the video portion of the film.

If you would like to go on a Wikipedia journey on related topics, I recommend these two articles:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Kopetzky_syndrome

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

King-Kopetsky syndrome. Damnit, so that's what it could be. Gotta have that checked out.

Wow. Good to know I'm not just going crazy. I score above average on hearing tests, being able to hear higher frequency tones even with 30, but I already have problems hearing someone talking into a direction away from me.

Yep, I've had this problem forever. Close relatives think I'm deaf before I can't understand them when there's a lot of ambient noise or they aren't speaking clearly, even though I can hear everything else just fine (and have always been very protective of my hearing). There's apparently no way I can convince them otherwise. In American culture, if you can't easily understand people speaking in a whisper in an extremely loud bar, then you're assumed to be hard of hearing.

The article puts forth that an inability to distinguish conversation in a loud bar is hearing loss, so blaming American culture for your medical issue is a bit strange.

Hearing loss can start with the inability to hear consonants in words.

My mother has it but won't get it checked and won't get a hearing aid. The slightest bit of noise to her is like the world is roaring and we are all mumbling.

I also worked with a guy who had almost no hearing in one ear and he was similar where any bit of noise and that was it he was gone no longer able to hear.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2787079/

I have experience the other way I worked evening shifts in a casino and I learned to hear through noise through crowds and could understand a person. I could hear someone ten feet away in a roaring crowd most times I could tell they were looking for help but I could hear them too.

Noise doesn't bother me, I just can't understand spoken speech if there's too much of it. It's always been this way, so I'm getting really sick and tired of all the assholes telling me I'm developing hearing loss. I've always been able to hear CRT monitors at a long distance, which most "normal" people can't. If you can't hear 15.75kHz, as far as I'm concerned, you're the one who's deaf.

That doesn't matter if you can hear the the whine of a CRT you can have hearing loss in a specific frequency.

We all have hearing loss as adults just past our teens we all lose the low 20Hz end and the high 20KHz end of our hearing that's normal.

My mother said as a teenager she listened to her transistor by holding it against her left ear. Now she can't hear high sounds out of her left ear but she can hear mid range and low range sounds perfectly.

I don't think anyone is trying to be an asshole. It's strange how we as a society can't say to a person you may have hearing loss but we can say to a person your eyes are bad maybe you need glasses.

I have this problem too, and it's one of the main reasons I now hate going to bars. If I'm in a group of people having a conversation I end up standing around concentrating hard to grasp a tiny percentage of what's going on (usually too late to chime in) by bad lip reading. Lots of nodding and flubbing and feeling stupid when someone asks me something. Mostly I just hear what could be described as loud crackly distortion - not fun. I can hear just fine without that background noise though. The ambient noise doesn't even have to be that loud either.

So you hear well but understand poorly?

This article tangentially mentions something I've long held, as a privately thought, as essential to the study of and eventual understanding of what defines sentience.

There is a fundamental difference between distinguishing stimuli and _choosing_ to distinguish stimuli. There is clearly a physical basis for fine detection and discrimination of auditory stimuli, whose mechanics lie in the ear, hair cells, auditory cortex, and so on, and these are fundamental to the ability to navigate a _very_ stimulus-ridden world.

However, the ability to _choose_ which stimuli to _pay attention to_ is, I feel, key to understanding sentience. Any system can respond to stimuli - not any system can _choose_ which stimuli to respond to. Understanding that ability of choice - that is, the process of attention - will be, I feel, a key step towards understanding sentience (and, eventually, how our own minds work).

I can't read this article without paying for a subscription.

Forgive my ignorance of procedure with something like this; should the title perhaps include an indication that the article is not free? I didn't see any guidelines concerning paid / subscription articles in the FAQ.

I'm not sure if it's documented, but for WSJ you can click the 'web' link, or do the equivalent of what the web link does.

This only works if the search term matches the title exactly. For instance, when the submission still had its original title (which matched the article's title), it worked. Then someone edited it and it now doesn't work. You have to open the article, select the title, right click > Search Google, then click the result from there.

I submitted it with the appropriate title. Not sure why it was changed.

Bleh. I just tried it in three different browsers and hit the paywall each time. It's too bad, I've had this condition for years. I guess I'll have to do my own reading on the side.

What is the 'web' link?

The link near the top of this page (HackerNews) that says "web". It's in an easy-to-miss list of light grey links.

Thanks, I never noticed that.

Look under the title of the comment thread. There is a link that literally says "web".

It looks like it checks for a referrer from Google.com. If I visit the page from Google without a referrer, it blocks me from reading it.

Take a look at this extension if you wanna read WSJ: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paywall-pass/

That helped when the web+google workaround didn't. Thank you!

Click the "web" link.

Try googling the article name and opening it from the search results.

This worked for me, but only when I googled the exact article name. I had to open up the article (in "pay or else" mode), copy the title from there, paste that into Google, and then click on the same search result that had failed many times prior. It finally opened the article up for me.

What a mess! Thanks for the help though. :D

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

The supposed WSJ paywall workarounds have never worked for me. I find WSJ posts to HN entirely useless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com