Study: Brain puts time codes on sounds for word recognition

The brain puts timestamps on audible sounds in order to recognize words, scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, have found, they tried to figure out exactly how the brain recognizes sequences of sounds, despite the fact that they often alternate very quickly. For example, the English words melon and lemon are the same sound minus the sequence of sounds.

To find out how this works, the researchers recorded the brain activity of English-speaking volunteers while listening to an audiobook. Among other things, the authors of the work were interested in the brain's response to individual sounds. The scientists explain in an article in Nature Communications that they found sounds of different types initiate a cascade of neuronal triggers in different areas of the auditory cortex. In other words, information about each of the three sounds in the word [K E T] passes through different neuronal populations in a specific sequence, allowing a time code to be set for each of the sounds depending on its order number.

This allows humans to perceive sounds in the correct sequence and thus recognize what the person they are talking to is saying.

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