Pop-outs: How the brain extracts meaning from noise

December 20, 2016

When you’re suddenly able to understand someone despite their thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain appears to be re-tuning to recognize speech that was previously incomprehensible.

UC Berkeley neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person’s brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found.


Read more from Berkeley News | December 20th, 2016: https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/12/20/pop-outs-how-the-brain-extracts-mea...