Related, but this reminds me of the story by Richard Feynman [1] when he practices counting up to 60 seconds in his head, and after many experiments around what he can do simultaneously conclude that he can simultaneously count and read but not speak. Later sharing this to John Tukey, he's told that Tukey can't read while counting but could speak while counting.
Turns out Tukey is visualizing looking at a tape, while he counts, while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself, so he couldn't speak while counting but Tukey couldn't read while counting
>By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads. when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for
different people. And we discovered that you
can externally and objectively test how the brain works: you don't have to ask a person how he
counts and rely on his ownobservations of him-self; instead, you observe what he can and can't do while he counts. The test is absolute.
There's no way to beat it; no way to fake it.
>It's natural to explain an idea in terms of
what you already have in your head. Concepts
are piled on top of each other; this idea is taught
in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in
terms of another idea, which comes from count-
ing, which can be so different for different
people!
>I often think about that, especially when I'm
teaching some esoteric technique such as integrat-
ing Bessel functions. When I see equations, I
see the letters in colors-I don't know why. As
I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel func-
tions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-
tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown
x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it
must look like to the students.
Interesting, I experimented a bit with this when my daughter was younger. I used to walk around the room with her in my arms singing to get her to sleep. To ensure she would be settled I would then count 300 steps before putting her in the cot. I discovered I could count and sing at the same time by visualising the number in my head, instead of using my inner monologue. But it requires more focus to maintain.
Thankfully these days she can get herself to sleep. But I miss it sometimes
I've noticed something similar. I can listen to audiobooks and follow/absorb what is going on without really paying attention, as long as I am not trying to read something. I can't follow an audiobook and read at the same time. This is probably because I subvocalize when I read. I have taken speed reading courses but I don't enjoy reading that way. I like feeling every word as I read.
I have two modes of reading - when I read a story to enjoy, I read it to myself with inner voice saying the words (like internal audiobook). When I read to gather information quickly, I try to just absorb as much keywords as possible by quickly glancing at text and trying to directly absorb the text, rereading where needed.
No, I can do both but absorb much better when I internal monologue it but can read much faster when I don't. Some people don't internal monologue it at all.
If you're in the market for another "wait I thought everyone did it X way?!" surprise look up aphantasia where some percentage of people can't mentally "picture" items and there's a whole spectrum of vividness. I've yet to find someone not surprised by this no matter where they are on the spectrum.
The sentence below will be written when I'm counting to 60
Let me try counting while writing, it's hard with tons of mistakes and typo (like switching count with write), it's also demonstrably slower with this whole sentence taking more that 60 count. Verbalizing the count is way harder and I need frequent stops to gather my thoughts
If reading aloud a children story, you may notice you are able to maintain an independent unrelated train of thought. While doing so, I notice that occasionally extra mistakes can "leak" into the story telling - e.g. you read a single word incorrectly, maybe substituting a word from your other train of thought.
When I was a kid, my dad (a physicist) would often read stories to me and my brother. He would sometimes fall asleep while reading, and we could tell when that was coming because suddenly our children's story would stop making sense and get filled with all these big physics terms.
Somewhat related, but when I was sleep deprived and falling asleep during a general relativity lecture in college, I caught myself reasoning through the series of equations written by the professor on the board, and agreeing as to their validity with the explanation in my mind being that my parents are in a foreign country. My brain was convinced it had logically checked the progression and that it made sense, but it was based on this irrelevant fact. The experience always makes me wonder what falsehoods we individually or collectively use to convince ourselves of things being true.
Oh yeah, I have been sleep deprived so much that the things that I said made no sense. I still formulated sentences but they did not have any meaning. In fact, I noticed this myself and I was like "fuck, what I just said made no sense". This happened a few times. It is a pretty interesting experience.
I had the same experience after almost 4+ days going without sleep. A friend came to check up on me after I fell asleep, I woke up and started telling him a whole story that made no sense, but I said it with such importance that for a week he was asking me to explain to him what I meant...which I don't remember exactly, but it was important.
The ability of the brain to do that gives me 15 min of quiet time to think about problems each evening. But you cannot follow the story in that mode, and the whole facade will collapse on a single innocent question...
In school, our teachers made us take turns reading the textbook. When it was my turn, I focused entirely on how my voice sounded, trying to match my cadence and tone to the punctuation. The moment I finished the paragraph, I would have to quickly re-read it in silence just to understand what it actually said.
I think I still can't read a non-trivial text aloud while trying to make sense of it at the same time. I need the two streams just for one text.
I can do that, and i notice that i kinda stop thinking about the reading and put more "brain resources" into the independent train of thought. Then i realize i was reading all the time without putting any effort in it
The ability may take time to develop. If you have a couple under-5 children handy, who'd love the ritual of having the same ultra-simplistic and repetitive books read to them every night, night after night after night, when your head is probably full of grownup stuff that you gotta get done...
I've always been impressed by the controllers in centers and TRACONs. They can have multiple frequencies they're monitoring in each ear, and no matter how polite we try to be we (pilots) have no way of knowing if we're stepping on a call on another frequency. They just have to deal with it. Not to mention communication amongst themselves to some extent as they hand people off, though I haven't been in a tower for a very long time, that may be automated/digital now.
And it's not like pilot/controller conversations are about weekend BBQ plans. It's as information dense as possible without sounding like a METAR report.
The drive through window staffers at restaurants do this, and it’s crazy. They will tell me my order and total, accept payment, and send me to the next window, all while listening to the next person tell them their order.
That tracks. As a teacher I sometimes find myself conversing with multiple kids simultaniously as well. If it's nothing too deep that requires full focus, it works. (Though I do find it tiring and avoid it.)
Perhaps a dumb question but are they center panned (or mono, i.e. talking over each other) or is it split left ear/right ear when they come through the headset?
Airplane radios are generally broadcasting and receiving mono. There are modern headsets that can also play stereo, but only for onboard music or intercom purposes, if the plane supports it. But in planes with 2 radios you can usually configure their I/O individually. So you can listen (and also talk, although that makes sense less often) on two frequencies at the same time.
Yes of course, the transmitted audio would be mono. I meant one radio in one ear and another radio in the other ear, or if you mix them and they both play in both ears. But it sounds like they're mixed (talking over each other in a single audio stream).
Yes. I have never seen any system (planes or elsewhere) that splits multiple voice communication inputs so you hear different streams in different ears. How would that be different (let alone better) than having both streams in both ears? It's not like your brain can process each ear separately.
But of course your brain can process each ear separately. You have a holistic conscious experience, but that is like a hallucination constructed by your brain for your own benefit.
The raw signals are indeed "in stereo"
They are mono, but I was trying to say that with practice, you can process 2 independent audio streams simultaneously irrespective of whether they are mono or stereo. For example, I am able to keep track of 2 people talking at the same time. I obviously can't respond to both but can maintain independent contexts.
I think it was wondered whether you were having the independent streams panned hard to the left and right ears and if that had something to do with hemispheres of the brain and the processing efficiency.
I wonder if reading techniques (i.e. human TTS) are also a bit like this. You have to "read ahead" and maintain a mental buffer, in order to parse the sentences so that you can put emphasis in the correct places, timing etc. So the eyes and mind are ahead of the speech.
There is an interesting point about this from animation.
Imagine you are seeing a pendulum clock and it makes a "tick" on one extreme and "tock" on the other.
When they first started doing animation + sound they noticed that if you play the "tock" sound at the exact same time the pendulum hit the extreme, people would think it was delayed.
Research showed that humans required a small amount of time to "context switch" from one stimulus to another. I think it's about 1/16th of a second.
If you couldn't process multiple streams ( audio/visual/other senses ) how would you ever be able to monitor the background for danger and context switch?
There is a difference between conscious experience and what's going on in the background.
There’s a big difference between processing multiple streams, and processing multiple streams simultaneously.
You can achieve the former, without the latter, by doing time slicing. Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
Proving the brain is continuously processing and encoding multiple streams simultaneously is an interesting finding that helps us better understand how our brains handle multitasking. That’s absolutely something worth studying and understanding, even if the headline discovery “feels” obvious. It the precise mechanism that’s interesting, not the effect the mechanism produces.
> Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
The brain isn't a computer with a single CPU - just because computers are built that way doesn't mean the brain is.
Ie it's only surprising if you start with an erroneous computer based model of how the brain works.
When I meditated a lot, I was able to sit in a cafe and listen to 3 conversations without switching and be able to understand them and remember them all. It happened to me few times. Also, once, sleeping in a tent, a voice from a dream interfered with sound of raindrops and became distorted and I woke up scared only to quickly get what just happened.
Not sure why you are downvoted.
Well it probably doesnt require meditation because split attention is somewhat common here. My mother can follow multiple discussions like have a phone conversation and understand what I tell her.
In general I can't.
So a bit harder for me. I can focus on work and follow some podcasts but not speak and at the same time listen to a full parallel convo.
I do believe brain to brain communication exists from experience too. People will be quick to call it schizophrenia and indeed it can be maddening because it evidently reuses your neurotransmitters for information propagation. That includes dopamine and can lead to the same issues some diagnosed people have, but actually a couple at the same time.
Without visual hallucinations but the brain gets a bit taken still, since it has to share processing.
So it can induce adhd like symptoms, loss of phantasia, nucleus acumbens becoming nucleus incumbered :D, impaired motivation, etc.. But it is transient and you can argue it within yourself with some amount of relief.
If you notice and start a loop of wondering where it comes from you are toast though.
Anyway, probably saying too much. You have to experience it. Probably someone playing with AI and neurochemistry. Still can't figure out the actual transport system.
It does not make much sense from a wavelength point of view.
Even if merely HF acoustic waves (since they can be more directed) not quite sure. Should ask whoever big galaxy brain created the havana effect... \sarcasm
At the same time people already know publicly how to decode brain signals and turn them into movements and Computer Interface actions. So the brain is not a complete blackbox. Some people might be further along...
Anyway... we will know eventually what is this all about..
likely related to how trained and some untrained dogs sense what you are up to consciously or not (yet).
brains smell/decode info that we don't have an actual odor (but receptors) for.
it's also why (some) pets and animals react to their human's mood/attitude and short-, mid-, long-term stress (and other) hormone levels.
some people get their energy drained by persons that they are not even aware of being in proximity (e.g. dad got home after work while child is wearing headphones). it can become a matter of good or bad resilience, too, and some brains can develop defence mechanisms by mere exposure while others can't, which is likely (definitely) entangled in/with hormone metabolisms.
Sure. Still don't see why the result is at all surprising.
If you couldn't process multiple streams ( I see nothing special about speech - note parsing speech is potentially different from thinking over the top - ie the difference between hearing and listening ) simultaneously it's hard to see how you'd last 5 minutes.
Famously, the Apollo Mission control team learned to handle multiple conversations stream simultaneously. The side effect was that going to cocktail parties was a nightmare, because they couldn’t turn it off.
My issue is that I can't stop processing other speech streams. It seems other people can tune out conversations around them when talking to a person but I have to hear every word
Many mindfulness practices seem to direct attention at two place at once, to quiet the inner voice. Perhaps this relates to more than just speech, but to attention itself. George Gurdjieff's "The Fourth Way" deals with self remembering, and his pupil, P. D. Ouspensky, has a very vivid description in [1] of how focusing on two things at once leads to a changed state of consciousness, that seems like meditation, and comes from the saturation of the two streams of attention.
One of the first ways I learned to meditate/access different states of mind was a technique described as "overload trance" (IIRC). The premise was, listen to a piece of music, focusing on one musical component, then while keeping that focus, add another element, and another, etc.
It works best with pieces with a lot of ostinato (repetition/vamp) and Bach's Little Fugue in G minor was and is one of my favorites. Really fun to play too, though i get tripped up as soon as the feet get involved. Also, Utopia by Astral Projection (that whole album Trust in Trance 3 is great for this).
Bonus points to mentally visualizing something in time with the music (I like orbs whirling around like atomic orbitals). You can really tie up much of your mental processing this way and I find it much easier than traditional zen meditation, trying to bring focus back to eg. breathing.
ask any dj who doesnt use modern sync tools and they will tell u, u can follow 2 entire songs out of sync of eachother fine, it takes practice but your brain can get used to these kinda tasks. (ofc very unscientific here :D)
I’ve actually found that I’m able to process two speech streams and one music stream independently from those. At least for me, music seems to have a dedicated sub-processor of sorts.
Anecdotally, I have 3 young kids who sometimes all talk to me at once. It's impossible to process, but with 2, I've noticed it IS kinda possible process.
This seems potentially useful for attention-steered hearing aids. A system that waits for complete disengagement from the old speaker may react too slowly
Then it is known that if you play to someone with small delay what he says he will be lost on both - so he can't think about and listen to what he is saying if it's not one stream.
Supported by the empirical evidence of cube farms, post COVID in the early “return to office” days, when office etiquette was completely forgotten and people were listening to all their meetings on speaker, but we were still having all our meetings at our desks.
I would constantly hear people around the cube farm stumbling through sentences because they could hear themselves through a neighbors computer with a slight delay.
This makes me wonder how much of paying attention is really prioritization rather than filtering everything else out. We probably process far more than we're consciously aware of.
In the easiest look at people like me who complain very quick if something is wrong like to warm to cold to sweaty etc. and others not even ackknowliding it at all
When I was an infant I'd waddle through my mothers garden to my favourite fruit tree... a chilly bush. I'd pick the red chillies and eat them with gusto. My mouth would turn red but that didn't bother me. These were very hot chillies that my parents couldn't eat even when they were green.
Sadly, I lost that super power at some point. I love a spicy curry, but I don't think I'd make it through a Hot Ones episode as a guest.
And you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matter how much I practiced it, I was never able to get to where it would take place automatically without my forcing it.
Listening to two talkers at a time is certainly doable...
As is talking whilst listening to another conversation - eg. Giving a lecture whilst eves dropping on the people talking at the back of the lecture theatre.
However, having a two way conversation with one person whilst listening to another is really hard.
I'm a native English speaking pinball freak living as an expat in a German-speaking country, and I find myself often listening to English speakers on the train, while also carrying on a conversation in German .. and I have observed that the same part of my mind that can handle multi ball-pinball events, where during a pinball session multiple balls are in play, 'feels' active.
Its a kind of context juggling mechanism in both cases, and it feels like the same mental muscle being exercised in both cases.
I wonder if there is a worthwhile experiment to be conducted wherein an EEG'ed pinball player gets to play pinball with easy multi ball targets, while also listening to German and English speakers, and then passing a test at the end of it .. because I sure have been preparing for that kind of scenario lately ..
I read the paper's abstract. They're not actually claiming what commenters here think they are. They're saying that there's some sort of pipeline processing for the task of "listening to speech" and when the subject switches focus from listening to one speaker to another, that pipeline has to drain. And the new stream pipeline has to get loaded up. Not actually surprising when you think about how it would have to work. The same thing likely happens with vision.
I do a form of this all the time and I've always wondered "how." I can copy Morse Code--hearing the code and writing it down--while carrying on a conversation with someone else. I'm only "encoding" it, in that I have to read it to know what I just copied. The process of hearing a letter or word in Morse and moving my hand to write it has become so automatic that I can do it while having a live conversation with someone in the room.
It would be interesting to know what's going on in my head with an EEG or FMRI...
That's not a good argument. First, music is not speech. It doesn't require linguistic processing. Second, you can hear chords instead of individual voices, so polyphony can be perceived as shifting harmony, and it usually is.
Come on guys, the contribution of the research is that it made measurements of how the processing of multiple inputs is represented in EEGs, not whether or not we can handle multiple inputs. Stop acting snarky, it just shows you didn't read beyond the headline.
This is maybe only tangentially relevant to the linked study, but I've noticed I can read aloud from a book on autopilot while thinking about other things or even thinking back on past conversations. I could not do this a few years ago, but now it happens on its own. I wonder how that relates to attention and speech streams
Not reading out loud, but I've caught myself a few times on reading and not processing that, because I was thinking about something else. Like I still did the reading, but straight to /dev/null of my brain
I think everyone does this. It reminds me of a possible related phenomenon. The act of remembering what you do takes a few extra brain cells, to enable the “recording function “. If you are on complete autopilot, doing a routine task, you will often forget to turn on the recording function. Like the other day I tried to remember whther I had run the dryer and realized it had been completely optimized out of my memory.
I get that while driving home. I've driven half an hour and then realise I've been thinking about something else the entire time and cannot recall anything about the journey.
Welcome to a glimpse into the pathetic life [if one can even call it a life…] of a sad and wretched creature — the poor humans born with a deficiency of attention and an abundance of activity. This is a universal experience for the lost souls who stumble through life, burdened with a despicable and perverted simulacrum of a normal human’s brain, condemned with a condition more commonly known as…
The Dangerously Corrupted and Criminally Insane Mind of the ADHD Afflicted!
I experienced this too, when I started reading out loud more. At first, it was just that my eyes would scan ahead a bit from what I was saying, to help me get the right emphasis by knowing where the sentence was going. It felt like I had "handed off" saying the words out loud to a "subroutine", so my attention could be on what I was reading. Then that "readahead" extended to a whole sentence. And at that point it was like I was so far ahead of what I was saying that I had time to think about it a bit. And then at some point it was like the "reading the words" part got handed off to a "subroutine" too, so my attention could mostly stay on whatever I was thinking
This is something that has been studied and is apparently more common when reading out loud. I have this as well. I can read to my kids and at the same time plan the upcoming day. Pretty neat!
Many dj mixers offer the option to split the main mix to one ear and the cue’d track to the other, i have never been able to mix like that, only with cue on headphones and main mix out in the room/monitors. Weird
Your example is needlessly bleak, but in general: yes, we're a social species and being able to process multiple speech streams seems obviously pretty important in many social contexts involving more than two people.
Seems doubtful to me that there will be any hardware in our species specific to processing language. It's going to be the same basic hardware as Chimps. Whatever is going on that's related to us being a social species is all software.
Uh, there definitely is "hardware specific to processing language" for our species, they even have their own wiki pages[0][1].
And in general our brains differ significantly from that of a chimpansee. Human brains push neuron density to to absolute limit within the animal kingdom and have unique evolutionary adaptations that allow for it. As a result our species also has mental health disorders unique to us that seem to be cause by the neurons being pushed past that limit.
This is a completely different phenomenon. Your ear/brain are tuned to rhythmic beats in the lower frequencies (footsteps). We're better at pattern recognition with the lower frequencies.
Also, our brains will encode the differences in registers to evoke emotion differently, which is often used by horror films to make a scene scarier[0]. Evolutionarily this is probably to detect screams or babies crying, a rustling bush, etc.
Speech encoding, at least per this article, has little to do with that. We don't have music encoding so much as we have pattern recognition, instinctual emotional respond to sound, etc.
Another great video about how music is perceived in animals is [1], just while we're on the topic.
Related, but this reminds me of the story by Richard Feynman [1] when he practices counting up to 60 seconds in his head, and after many experiments around what he can do simultaneously conclude that he can simultaneously count and read but not speak. Later sharing this to John Tukey, he's told that Tukey can't read while counting but could speak while counting.
Turns out Tukey is visualizing looking at a tape, while he counts, while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself, so he couldn't speak while counting but Tukey couldn't read while counting
>By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads. when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for different people. And we discovered that you can externally and objectively test how the brain works: you don't have to ask a person how he counts and rely on his ownobservations of him-self; instead, you observe what he can and can't do while he counts. The test is absolute. There's no way to beat it; no way to fake it.
>It's natural to explain an idea in terms of what you already have in your head. Concepts are piled on top of each other; this idea is taught in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in terms of another idea, which comes from count- ing, which can be so different for different people!
>I often think about that, especially when I'm teaching some esoteric technique such as integrat- ing Bessel functions. When I see equations, I see the letters in colors-I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel func- tions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light- tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.
[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf
Interesting, I experimented a bit with this when my daughter was younger. I used to walk around the room with her in my arms singing to get her to sleep. To ensure she would be settled I would then count 300 steps before putting her in the cot. I discovered I could count and sing at the same time by visualising the number in my head, instead of using my inner monologue. But it requires more focus to maintain.
Thankfully these days she can get herself to sleep. But I miss it sometimes
If you miss it, maybe she does too. You can still do it even though she doesn’t need it
Maybe. But as a parent, sometimes you have to make sacrifices (or force them to make sacrifices) as otherwise they won't have space grow.
Ugh, yeah. It’s the worst. It’s the best.
I've noticed something similar. I can listen to audiobooks and follow/absorb what is going on without really paying attention, as long as I am not trying to read something. I can't follow an audiobook and read at the same time. This is probably because I subvocalize when I read. I have taken speed reading courses but I don't enjoy reading that way. I like feeling every word as I read.
I read by imagining a voice saying the words. Is that not how everyone reads?
It is not.
I have two modes of reading - when I read a story to enjoy, I read it to myself with inner voice saying the words (like internal audiobook). When I read to gather information quickly, I try to just absorb as much keywords as possible by quickly glancing at text and trying to directly absorb the text, rereading where needed.
No, I can do both but absorb much better when I internal monologue it but can read much faster when I don't. Some people don't internal monologue it at all.
If you're in the market for another "wait I thought everyone did it X way?!" surprise look up aphantasia where some percentage of people can't mentally "picture" items and there's a whole spectrum of vividness. I've yet to find someone not surprised by this no matter where they are on the spectrum.
> while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself
ironic )
I can also count while reading, I just tried it. But I can't write while counting.
I can have one interpretation and one generative task running at the same time.
I can count while reading and it's fairly easy
The sentence below will be written when I'm counting to 60
Let me try counting while writing, it's hard with tons of mistakes and typo (like switching count with write), it's also demonstrably slower with this whole sentence taking more that 60 count. Verbalizing the count is way harder and I need frequent stops to gather my thoughts
It really does feel like reading and counting can occupy separate lanes, while writing and counting are both trying to use the same internal narrator
A CPU designer might call them execution ports.
This is a nice example of using interference as a window into representation
If reading aloud a children story, you may notice you are able to maintain an independent unrelated train of thought. While doing so, I notice that occasionally extra mistakes can "leak" into the story telling - e.g. you read a single word incorrectly, maybe substituting a word from your other train of thought.
When I was a kid, my dad (a physicist) would often read stories to me and my brother. He would sometimes fall asleep while reading, and we could tell when that was coming because suddenly our children's story would stop making sense and get filled with all these big physics terms.
Somewhat related, but when I was sleep deprived and falling asleep during a general relativity lecture in college, I caught myself reasoning through the series of equations written by the professor on the board, and agreeing as to their validity with the explanation in my mind being that my parents are in a foreign country. My brain was convinced it had logically checked the progression and that it made sense, but it was based on this irrelevant fact. The experience always makes me wonder what falsehoods we individually or collectively use to convince ourselves of things being true.
That is an amazing sleep indicator: once the rabbit starts discussing thermodynamics, dad has left the building
Oh yeah, I have been sleep deprived so much that the things that I said made no sense. I still formulated sentences but they did not have any meaning. In fact, I noticed this myself and I was like "fuck, what I just said made no sense". This happened a few times. It is a pretty interesting experience.
I had the same experience after almost 4+ days going without sleep. A friend came to check up on me after I fell asleep, I woke up and started telling him a whole story that made no sense, but I said it with such importance that for a week he was asking me to explain to him what I meant...which I don't remember exactly, but it was important.
The ability of the brain to do that gives me 15 min of quiet time to think about problems each evening. But you cannot follow the story in that mode, and the whole facade will collapse on a single innocent question...
> "Dad, why did he steal the biycle?!?!"
> ".... what?"
In school, our teachers made us take turns reading the textbook. When it was my turn, I focused entirely on how my voice sounded, trying to match my cadence and tone to the punctuation. The moment I finished the paragraph, I would have to quickly re-read it in silence just to understand what it actually said.
I think I still can't read a non-trivial text aloud while trying to make sense of it at the same time. I need the two streams just for one text.
I can do that, and i notice that i kinda stop thinking about the reading and put more "brain resources" into the independent train of thought. Then i realize i was reading all the time without putting any effort in it
Yeah it's like I suddenly realise I haven't been thinking about the reading and I'm near the bottom of the next page somehow.
The reading task can stay largely automatic until both streams try to use the same speech-production machinery at once
Interlinked.
I definitely cannot do that. Crazy.
The ability may take time to develop. If you have a couple under-5 children handy, who'd love the ritual of having the same ultra-simplistic and repetitive books read to them every night, night after night after night, when your head is probably full of grownup stuff that you gotta get done...
or any other reading for that matter!
As a pilot and a radio officer, I have always been able to process and service 2 audio streams simultaneously. So not surprised with this finding.
I've always been impressed by the controllers in centers and TRACONs. They can have multiple frequencies they're monitoring in each ear, and no matter how polite we try to be we (pilots) have no way of knowing if we're stepping on a call on another frequency. They just have to deal with it. Not to mention communication amongst themselves to some extent as they hand people off, though I haven't been in a tower for a very long time, that may be automated/digital now.
And it's not like pilot/controller conversations are about weekend BBQ plans. It's as information dense as possible without sounding like a METAR report.
The drive through window staffers at restaurants do this, and it’s crazy. They will tell me my order and total, accept payment, and send me to the next window, all while listening to the next person tell them their order.
That tracks. As a teacher I sometimes find myself conversing with multiple kids simultaniously as well. If it's nothing too deep that requires full focus, it works. (Though I do find it tiring and avoid it.)
Perhaps a dumb question but are they center panned (or mono, i.e. talking over each other) or is it split left ear/right ear when they come through the headset?
Airplane radios are generally broadcasting and receiving mono. There are modern headsets that can also play stereo, but only for onboard music or intercom purposes, if the plane supports it. But in planes with 2 radios you can usually configure their I/O individually. So you can listen (and also talk, although that makes sense less often) on two frequencies at the same time.
Yes of course, the transmitted audio would be mono. I meant one radio in one ear and another radio in the other ear, or if you mix them and they both play in both ears. But it sounds like they're mixed (talking over each other in a single audio stream).
Yes. I have never seen any system (planes or elsewhere) that splits multiple voice communication inputs so you hear different streams in different ears. How would that be different (let alone better) than having both streams in both ears? It's not like your brain can process each ear separately.
But of course your brain can process each ear separately. You have a holistic conscious experience, but that is like a hallucination constructed by your brain for your own benefit. The raw signals are indeed "in stereo"
They are mono, but I was trying to say that with practice, you can process 2 independent audio streams simultaneously irrespective of whether they are mono or stereo. For example, I am able to keep track of 2 people talking at the same time. I obviously can't respond to both but can maintain independent contexts.
I think it was wondered whether you were having the independent streams panned hard to the left and right ears and if that had something to do with hemispheres of the brain and the processing efficiency.
I wonder if piano players find that easier too, compared to lay people.
I do it too, but I "buffer" one person's speech while I process the other's, and vice versa. Do you process both at once?
I wonder if reading techniques (i.e. human TTS) are also a bit like this. You have to "read ahead" and maintain a mental buffer, in order to parse the sentences so that you can put emphasis in the correct places, timing etc. So the eyes and mind are ahead of the speech.
There is an interesting point about this from animation.
Imagine you are seeing a pendulum clock and it makes a "tick" on one extreme and "tock" on the other.
When they first started doing animation + sound they noticed that if you play the "tock" sound at the exact same time the pendulum hit the extreme, people would think it was delayed.
Research showed that humans required a small amount of time to "context switch" from one stimulus to another. I think it's about 1/16th of a second.
Some interesting other observations about time perception here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception
If you couldn't process multiple streams ( audio/visual/other senses ) how would you ever be able to monitor the background for danger and context switch?
There is a difference between conscious experience and what's going on in the background.
There’s a big difference between processing multiple streams, and processing multiple streams simultaneously.
You can achieve the former, without the latter, by doing time slicing. Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
Proving the brain is continuously processing and encoding multiple streams simultaneously is an interesting finding that helps us better understand how our brains handle multitasking. That’s absolutely something worth studying and understanding, even if the headline discovery “feels” obvious. It the precise mechanism that’s interesting, not the effect the mechanism produces.
> Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
The brain isn't a computer with a single CPU - just because computers are built that way doesn't mean the brain is.
Ie it's only surprising if you start with an erroneous computer based model of how the brain works.
When I meditated a lot, I was able to sit in a cafe and listen to 3 conversations without switching and be able to understand them and remember them all. It happened to me few times. Also, once, sleeping in a tent, a voice from a dream interfered with sound of raindrops and became distorted and I woke up scared only to quickly get what just happened.
Not sure why you are downvoted. Well it probably doesnt require meditation because split attention is somewhat common here. My mother can follow multiple discussions like have a phone conversation and understand what I tell her. In general I can't.
So a bit harder for me. I can focus on work and follow some podcasts but not speak and at the same time listen to a full parallel convo.
I do believe brain to brain communication exists from experience too. People will be quick to call it schizophrenia and indeed it can be maddening because it evidently reuses your neurotransmitters for information propagation. That includes dopamine and can lead to the same issues some diagnosed people have, but actually a couple at the same time.
Without visual hallucinations but the brain gets a bit taken still, since it has to share processing. So it can induce adhd like symptoms, loss of phantasia, nucleus acumbens becoming nucleus incumbered :D, impaired motivation, etc.. But it is transient and you can argue it within yourself with some amount of relief. If you notice and start a loop of wondering where it comes from you are toast though.
Anyway, probably saying too much. You have to experience it. Probably someone playing with AI and neurochemistry. Still can't figure out the actual transport system. It does not make much sense from a wavelength point of view. Even if merely HF acoustic waves (since they can be more directed) not quite sure. Should ask whoever big galaxy brain created the havana effect... \sarcasm
At the same time people already know publicly how to decode brain signals and turn them into movements and Computer Interface actions. So the brain is not a complete blackbox. Some people might be further along...
Anyway... we will know eventually what is this all about..
likely related to how trained and some untrained dogs sense what you are up to consciously or not (yet).
brains smell/decode info that we don't have an actual odor (but receptors) for.
it's also why (some) pets and animals react to their human's mood/attitude and short-, mid-, long-term stress (and other) hormone levels.
some people get their energy drained by persons that they are not even aware of being in proximity (e.g. dad got home after work while child is wearing headphones). it can become a matter of good or bad resilience, too, and some brains can develop defence mechanisms by mere exposure while others can't, which is likely (definitely) entangled in/with hormone metabolisms.
This is about multiple speech streams.
More specific from the mere ability to process multiple sensory streams in general.
Sure. Still don't see why the result is at all surprising.
If you couldn't process multiple streams ( I see nothing special about speech - note parsing speech is potentially different from thinking over the top - ie the difference between hearing and listening ) simultaneously it's hard to see how you'd last 5 minutes.
There is also a different quality of processing. Textunderstanding and danger deciphering of signals.
Sure.
Have you ever listened to music while simultaneously writing a comment on hacker news - and managed the split cognitive load effortlessly?
Famously, the Apollo Mission control team learned to handle multiple conversations stream simultaneously. The side effect was that going to cocktail parties was a nightmare, because they couldn’t turn it off.
I had assumed this was already well known.
My issue is that I can't stop processing other speech streams. It seems other people can tune out conversations around them when talking to a person but I have to hear every word
Many mindfulness practices seem to direct attention at two place at once, to quiet the inner voice. Perhaps this relates to more than just speech, but to attention itself. George Gurdjieff's "The Fourth Way" deals with self remembering, and his pupil, P. D. Ouspensky, has a very vivid description in [1] of how focusing on two things at once leads to a changed state of consciousness, that seems like meditation, and comes from the saturation of the two streams of attention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Miraculous
I believe this is why fugues are such a pleasure to listen to!
One of the first ways I learned to meditate/access different states of mind was a technique described as "overload trance" (IIRC). The premise was, listen to a piece of music, focusing on one musical component, then while keeping that focus, add another element, and another, etc.
It works best with pieces with a lot of ostinato (repetition/vamp) and Bach's Little Fugue in G minor was and is one of my favorites. Really fun to play too, though i get tripped up as soon as the feet get involved. Also, Utopia by Astral Projection (that whole album Trust in Trance 3 is great for this).
Bonus points to mentally visualizing something in time with the music (I like orbs whirling around like atomic orbitals). You can really tie up much of your mental processing this way and I find it much easier than traditional zen meditation, trying to bring focus back to eg. breathing.
Little fugue: https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4
Trust in trance 3 playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mHhgZDphEanJgP6zSz...
I knew a few ham radio guys who could copy Morse code at greater than 20 WPM and simultaneously carry on a conversation.
“Bilocation” was one of the legendary superpowers of Pythagoras (he was miraculously able to lecture in two cities at the same time).
Whenever I’m in multiple conversations at once in a social setting, I think of Pythagoras
I wonder if parallel processing is related to musical training or ability.
I've always been jealous of people who can play the drums and sing or play piano with both hands and a foot while singing.
I can do the music part just fine. But listening to two conversations at the same time just means I understand neither of them.
ask any dj who doesnt use modern sync tools and they will tell u, u can follow 2 entire songs out of sync of eachother fine, it takes practice but your brain can get used to these kinda tasks. (ofc very unscientific here :D)
I’ve actually found that I’m able to process two speech streams and one music stream independently from those. At least for me, music seems to have a dedicated sub-processor of sorts.
Anecdotally, I have 3 young kids who sometimes all talk to me at once. It's impossible to process, but with 2, I've noticed it IS kinda possible process.
This seems potentially useful for attention-steered hearing aids. A system that waits for complete disengagement from the old speaker may react too slowly
Then it is known that if you play to someone with small delay what he says he will be lost on both - so he can't think about and listen to what he is saying if it's not one stream.
Supported by the empirical evidence of cube farms, post COVID in the early “return to office” days, when office etiquette was completely forgotten and people were listening to all their meetings on speaker, but we were still having all our meetings at our desks.
I would constantly hear people around the cube farm stumbling through sentences because they could hear themselves through a neighbors computer with a slight delay.
This makes me wonder how much of paying attention is really prioritization rather than filtering everything else out. We probably process far more than we're consciously aware of.
I def process more than I want.
Its def a spectrum.
In the easiest look at people like me who complain very quick if something is wrong like to warm to cold to sweaty etc. and others not even ackknowliding it at all
Absolutely. Take a look at "unconscious perception".
Humans are born with two ears anyways, right?
Yes, and you can also write two different sentences using two different pens in your hands.
When my son was about 4 or 5 he used to draw pictures with pens in both hands simultaneously which I was always amazed he could do!
When I was an infant I'd waddle through my mothers garden to my favourite fruit tree... a chilly bush. I'd pick the red chillies and eat them with gusto. My mouth would turn red but that didn't bother me. These were very hot chillies that my parents couldn't eat even when they were green.
Sadly, I lost that super power at some point. I love a spicy curry, but I don't think I'd make it through a Hot Ones episode as a guest.
Does your son still have his ability?
And you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matter how much I practiced it, I was never able to get to where it would take place automatically without my forcing it.
Listening to two talkers at a time is certainly doable...
As is talking whilst listening to another conversation - eg. Giving a lecture whilst eves dropping on the people talking at the back of the lecture theatre.
However, having a two way conversation with one person whilst listening to another is really hard.
Not sure why.
I'm a native English speaking pinball freak living as an expat in a German-speaking country, and I find myself often listening to English speakers on the train, while also carrying on a conversation in German .. and I have observed that the same part of my mind that can handle multi ball-pinball events, where during a pinball session multiple balls are in play, 'feels' active.
Its a kind of context juggling mechanism in both cases, and it feels like the same mental muscle being exercised in both cases.
I wonder if there is a worthwhile experiment to be conducted wherein an EEG'ed pinball player gets to play pinball with easy multi ball targets, while also listening to German and English speakers, and then passing a test at the end of it .. because I sure have been preparing for that kind of scenario lately ..
Listening and responding are likely pretty different mental activities
You're using one of the streams for yourself. :P
I read the paper's abstract. They're not actually claiming what commenters here think they are. They're saying that there's some sort of pipeline processing for the task of "listening to speech" and when the subject switches focus from listening to one speaker to another, that pipeline has to drain. And the new stream pipeline has to get loaded up. Not actually surprising when you think about how it would have to work. The same thing likely happens with vision.
Of course, because we have two ears.
you guys telling me you still listening to only 1 podcast at the time?
Left ear: Mozart, right ear: The Bible in Chinese
The simultaneous neural representation is very interesting result here
"humans have only one language processor" -- this is what I remember from Patrick Henry Winstons lecture
Async-programming style single-core concurrency would still look like parallelism to an outside observer :)
I do a form of this all the time and I've always wondered "how." I can copy Morse Code--hearing the code and writing it down--while carrying on a conversation with someone else. I'm only "encoding" it, in that I have to read it to know what I just copied. The process of hearing a letter or word in Morse and moving my hand to write it has become so automatic that I can do it while having a live conversation with someone in the room.
It would be interesting to know what's going on in my head with an EEG or FMRI...
The same is true for music, otherwise canons and polyphony wouldn't work.
That's not a good argument. First, music is not speech. It doesn't require linguistic processing. Second, you can hear chords instead of individual voices, so polyphony can be perceived as shifting harmony, and it usually is.
Come on guys, the contribution of the research is that it made measurements of how the processing of multiple inputs is represented in EEGs, not whether or not we can handle multiple inputs. Stop acting snarky, it just shows you didn't read beyond the headline.
This is maybe only tangentially relevant to the linked study, but I've noticed I can read aloud from a book on autopilot while thinking about other things or even thinking back on past conversations. I could not do this a few years ago, but now it happens on its own. I wonder how that relates to attention and speech streams
Not reading out loud, but I've caught myself a few times on reading and not processing that, because I was thinking about something else. Like I still did the reading, but straight to /dev/null of my brain
I think everyone does this. It reminds me of a possible related phenomenon. The act of remembering what you do takes a few extra brain cells, to enable the “recording function “. If you are on complete autopilot, doing a routine task, you will often forget to turn on the recording function. Like the other day I tried to remember whther I had run the dryer and realized it had been completely optimized out of my memory.
I get that while driving home. I've driven half an hour and then realise I've been thinking about something else the entire time and cannot recall anything about the journey.
Welcome to a glimpse into the pathetic life [if one can even call it a life…] of a sad and wretched creature — the poor humans born with a deficiency of attention and an abundance of activity. This is a universal experience for the lost souls who stumble through life, burdened with a despicable and perverted simulacrum of a normal human’s brain, condemned with a condition more commonly known as…
The Dangerously Corrupted and Criminally Insane Mind of the ADHD Afflicted!
I experienced this too, when I started reading out loud more. At first, it was just that my eyes would scan ahead a bit from what I was saying, to help me get the right emphasis by knowing where the sentence was going. It felt like I had "handed off" saying the words out loud to a "subroutine", so my attention could be on what I was reading. Then that "readahead" extended to a whole sentence. And at that point it was like I was so far ahead of what I was saying that I had time to think about it a bit. And then at some point it was like the "reading the words" part got handed off to a "subroutine" too, so my attention could mostly stay on whatever I was thinking
This is something that has been studied and is apparently more common when reading out loud. I have this as well. I can read to my kids and at the same time plan the upcoming day. Pretty neat!
Sometimes I read a book out loud and think about something completely different.
I wonder if reading aloud might be like walking. I can be walking and speaking to a person at the same time.
My wife's brain could probably do that. I'm not so sure about mine.
The DJ is explained.
Many dj mixers offer the option to split the main mix to one ear and the cue’d track to the other, i have never been able to mix like that, only with cue on headphones and main mix out in the room/monitors. Weird
yep, my wife does this routinely
parents tend to yell at the same time and it needs simultaneous processing
Your example is needlessly bleak, but in general: yes, we're a social species and being able to process multiple speech streams seems obviously pretty important in many social contexts involving more than two people.
Seems doubtful to me that there will be any hardware in our species specific to processing language. It's going to be the same basic hardware as Chimps. Whatever is going on that's related to us being a social species is all software.
Uh, there definitely is "hardware specific to processing language" for our species, they even have their own wiki pages[0][1].
And in general our brains differ significantly from that of a chimpansee. Human brains push neuron density to to absolute limit within the animal kingdom and have unique evolutionary adaptations that allow for it. As a result our species also has mental health disorders unique to us that seem to be cause by the neurons being pushed past that limit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
Also explains why we like music with two simultaneous distinct sections (bass + the rest). One without the other doesn't feel as complete
This is a completely different phenomenon. Your ear/brain are tuned to rhythmic beats in the lower frequencies (footsteps). We're better at pattern recognition with the lower frequencies.
Also, our brains will encode the differences in registers to evoke emotion differently, which is often used by horror films to make a scene scarier[0]. Evolutionarily this is probably to detect screams or babies crying, a rustling bush, etc.
Speech encoding, at least per this article, has little to do with that. We don't have music encoding so much as we have pattern recognition, instinctual emotional respond to sound, etc.
Another great video about how music is perceived in animals is [1], just while we're on the topic.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-hidden-sounds-...
[1] https://youtu.be/0ZYhyewNQMo?is=0mWSRAzObOD2p32E
If you can listen to someone play the piano with two hands, it’s a short hop to get to speech.
Not really (except perhaps if it's Stockhausen they're playing). A piece of music played with two hands is still one coherent information stream.