How playing an instrument benefits your brain ... - YouTube

Noise levels at or above 85 decibels can cause permanent hearing damage after eight hours — the length of a server's shift. CBC "Day 6". Measure and rate the noise level of your restaurant with this app.

Peter Tyack of Woods Hole explains the amazing ways whales use sound and song to communicate across hundreds of miles of ocean.

Charles Limb performs cochlear implantation, a surgery that treats hearing loss and can restore the ability to hear speech. But as a musician too, Limb thinks about what the implants lack: They don't let you fully experience music yet. Q&A with Charles Limb.

"The Sound of Persuasion" Advertising has used sound to sell for decades. But sound can be used for more than painting pictures on radio - sound can be carefully created to persuade. The stories behind those sounds are fascinating - from the earliest recorded sound in history, to the first use of sound in radio commercials, to signature sounds on famous TV ad campaigns, and even to the startup sound we hear on our computers everyday.

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.

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.

Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

Virtual Barber Shop (Audio...use headphones, close ur eyes)

Does this make any sense? "Ths cn b hrd fr ppl to cmprhnd; howvr, mst ppl cn ndrstntd ths sntnc wth lttl prblm." Try reading it out loud.

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

Why do we yawn? These authors suggest it is for communication.

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