Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Hearing is so effortless for most of us that it's often difficult to comprehend how much

information the brain's auditory system needs to process. It has to take incoming sounds

and transform them into the acoustic objects that we perceive, a friend's voice, a dog barking,

the pitter-patter of rain.

It has to pull relevant sounds from background noise.

It has to determine that a word spoken by two different people has the same linguistic meaning,

while also distinguishing between those voices and assessing them for pitch, tone, and other

qualities. Maybe that's why the brain starts to give speech special treatment, surprisingly

early in the processing of sounds, as new work shows. That's next.

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According to traditional models of neural processing, when we hear sounds, our auditory system

extracts simple features from them that then get combined

into increasingly complex and abstract representations. This process allows the brain to turn the

sound of someone speaking into units of sound, then syllables, and eventually words. But in a paper

published in Cell in August,

...