LinKs to relevant WEB sites

Hearing

Patricia Kuhl shares her findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world. Patricia K. Kuhl's research interest page. "Infants are born "Citizens of the World" with regard to language. They can distinguish sounds from languages around the world, even if they've never heard them before. By the end of the first year of life, however, they become "language-specialists," and have lost the ability to attend to sounds from foreign languages."

An example of a Broca's Aphasia. An other patient with Wernicke's Aphasia.

Dr.Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight from Ted Talks and its effects in her speech areas. Author of the best seller "My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey"

Babies 'cry in mother's tongue'. Crying newborn Babies' cries imitate their mother tongue as early as three days old. German researchers say babies begin to pick up the nuances of their parents' accents while still in the womb.

The visual system has a powerful influence on what we hear. In a noisy room we often read people's lips to understand what they are saying. However vision can be used to mislead what we hear. One example of this is the McGurk Effect. Click here to get a movie of the McGurk Effect.

A new study by Jennifer Milne from The Brain and Mind Institute at Western University found that the areas of the brain that use the echo-based cues about an object's shape are also located in the same region of the brain activated by visual cues for shape in a sighted person.

Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Also about noisy open-plan offices.

How jokes are processed by the human brain.

Earbuds, often listened at 110 to 120 decibels, is reported to cause hearing loss after only about an hour and 15 minutes.'' The DB of different sounds.

How Cochlear implants work (from PBS).

Seeing colors to shapes or sounds. Listen to Ramachandran's lecture from the BBC.