From silence to cacophony, here's how your brain makes sense of the world

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It can be hard enough to answer the question, "what kind of music do you like?" But how about "why do you like it?" That's one of the many questions about the human brain and sound that neuroscientist Nina Kraus set out to answer in her book Of Sound Mind. In this interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro, she breaks down the science behind what our brains do when they process sound, and how it differs for each of us.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to NPR's Book of the Day.
0:04.0	I'm Andrew Limbaugh.
0:05.5	Now, I don't believe in guilty pleasures, especially not art, right?
0:09.3	TV, movies, books, music, like whatever you like.
0:12.1	Who cares?
0:13.2	But I can't help but feel embarrassed at how my body reacts when it hears this riff.
0:29.3	Music how my body reacts when it hears this riff. No shots at Litt's massive 90s hit my own worst enemy, but it's weird that this dirtbag rock song
0:35.9	has such a hold over me, right?
0:37.7	Like, what's going on biologically?
0:39.7	That's making me feel this way.
0:42.4	Well, that's the question at the heart of neuroscientist Nina Krause's new book of Sound Mind.
0:47.8	She talks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about it here.
0:50.9	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky
0:57.1	conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the
1:03.2	ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:09.6	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:15.5	As the sounds that I'm making right now, enter your ear.
1:19.1	Your brain is effortlessly turning those air vibrations into a sentence that has meaning.
1:25.2	Now, if we start to distort my voice, your brain has a harder time
1:30.0	deciphering what I'm saying. And if we auto-tune my words, turn them into music, and put a beat
1:38.5	under them, your brain processes this sentence in still different ways.
1:47.3	So what exactly is going on in your brain to make sense of those sounds?
	...

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