Listening Impact

1.   Dispatches from the scientific front brought to us by popular science wunderkind Jonah Lehrer. There is indeed a part of the brain associated with a sudden “ah-ha moment” of the type linked to key breakthroughs of luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Archimedes. It is called the anterior superior temporal gyrus and it is situated in the right hemisphere of the brain, just above your ear. When you get a sudden insight it registers a huge spike in activity, just like that light bulb.

2.  In a study scientists have observed that our brain stops us from getting bored when listening to uninteresting people by “rewriting” a dull speech to make it an interesting one.

The researchers have also observed that people listening to boring speeches adjust by creating an “inner voice” to drown out the offending speech.

The response in the brain starts the moment the brain listens to “monotonously-spoken” words it feels should be more communicative.

The consequent increase in the brain activity indicates to the presence of an inner voice, which makes “more vivid speech” in the place of boring speech, says the study conducted by scientists at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology.

“You may think the brain need not produce its own speech while listening to one that is already available. But, apparently, the brain is very picky on the speech it hears,” Dr Bo Yao, the principal author of the research has been quoted as saying to the Telegraph.

“When the brain hears monotonously-spoken direct speech quotations which it expects to be more vivid, the brain simply ‘talks over’ the speech it hears with more vivid speech utterances of its own.

“By doing so, the brain attempts to optimise the processing of the incoming speech, ensuring more speedy and accurate responses,” Yao stated.

The NeuroImage Journal has published the finding in the Sat, 24 March 2012  issue