{"id":1889,"date":"2012-11-13T19:16:48","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T19:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/?p=368"},"modified":"2012-11-13T19:16:48","modified_gmt":"2012-11-13T19:16:48","slug":"what-do-you-hear-right-now-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/what-do-you-hear-right-now-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"What do You Hear Right Now? Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seth Horowitz, a neuroscientist and Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University is asking an important question, what do you hear right now?\u00a0 Horowitz has a masters in Psychology, a\u00a0Ph. D\u00a0 in Human Neuroscience, and an impressive resume; working with the National Science Foundation, The Deafness Foundation, and NASA.\u00a0 He is an author, publishing a book called \u201cThe Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind\u201d and is also a member of the Advanced Brain Technologies Scientific Advisory Board.\u00a0 When a man like Seth has devoted his life to understanding how our brains work with sound, you should really listen<\/em> to him when he wants to talk about it.<\/p>\n

In an article<\/a> posted in the New York Times on Sunday, Seth discusses why sound is so much more important than we realize.\u00a0 First thing he asks is, what do you hear right now?\u00a0 <\/em>In my house, it\u2019s the distant voices of the TV in the other room, the hum and inevitable crackle of the ice maker, a leaf blower from a neighbor finishing up his yard, and of course, the fan on my laptop spinning ever so slightly.\u00a0 The point of this question is to make you think about the sounds around you, or more importantly, let you brain take control of your sensory experience.\u00a0 Listening is different than hearing, a fact that my fianc\u00e9 reminds me of often.\u00a0 We learn to drown out sounds over time, much like parents not realizing just how loud their child is in a store, because they are so used to drowning out the sound at home.\u00a0 As a person without kids, a yelling child shocks me out of a relaxed state and makes me focus.\u00a0 That\u2019s the difference.\u00a0 Seth says it best, \u201cThe difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cHearing is a vastly underrated sense<\/em>.\u201d I couldn\u2019t agree more with this statement.\u00a0 So much of this world is focused on the visual aspect of things, missing out completely on the audio.\u00a0 I\u2019ve come across similar viewpoints in gaming when interviewing Audio Directors of game companies.\u00a0 Audio is always the most underrated and\u00a0under appreciated\u00a0part of games, movies, and perhaps part of life.\u00a0 Next time you come across a scary movie on TV, put it on mute for a minute or two.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing how less scary, and sometimes even a bit silly it becomes.\u00a0 Games lose a lot of their entertainment value without sound, and music, well, what\u2019s music without being able to hear it?<\/p>\n

Hearing is a mind-blowingly quick sense.\u00a0 Horowitz says, \u201cWhile it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 He describes hearing as our \u201calarm system\u201d evolving over time to protect us even when the danger is out of sight or we are asleep.\u00a0 Our auditory system is a thing of wonder, having built in \u201cvolume control\u201d to tune out the unimportant noises and alert us to the ones that could possibly be dangerous or rewarding.\u00a0 This is why you can be sitting in your home with the TV blaring and kids screaming and still hear a slight knock on the door.\u00a0When you hear one of these sounds that your auditory system deemed important enough for you to know about, \u201cattention\u201d takes over.<\/p>\n

Check back soon for Part 2<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seth Horowitz, a neuroscientist and Assistant Research Professor in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[508],"tags":[402,800,392],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}