Tag Archives: audition

June 18

Left over right: Communicative auditory processing from mice to men

The terms “left” and “right”, if not used to give directions, are often evoked to describe a preference. You might prefer to kick with your right leg, or throw with your right arm, or lead with your right foot on your skateboard or surfboard. Political convictions often lean left or right. And then there’s handedness, […]

May 05

Hello Darkness My Old Friend: How Echolocation Lets Bats Rule the Night

When I asked my boyfriend, a 15-year-old stuck in 28-year-old’s body, who would win in a battle between Batman and Superman in anticipation of the now-in-theaters “smash-flop” blockbuster, he responded, “Obviously Superman with his powers of x-ray vision and superhuman strength.  Batman is just a human with fancy technology.”  Such gadgets as a tape erasing […]

June 11

Technicalities of the Tingles: The science of sounds that feel good. #ASMR

“I wanted someone speaking in lightly accented English. And I wanted them talking to me about jewelry, slowly and deliberately.” — Andrea Seigel, This American Life #491: Tribes (aired March 29, 2013) Now that NeuWriteSD’s gender month is over, I thought I’d ease our readers back into the usual routine with a scientifically-stimulating but slightly […]

April 09

You Do Have a Sixth Sense – and More!

Ever wish you had more than just five senses? Sure, it’s cool to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste the world, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to sense other things? Perhaps you would prefer X-ray vision, telepathy, the ability to tell the future, or maybe you want to see dead people (or […]

July 24

Lucy’s Brain: Use it or lose it

With the Lucy movie coming out, we’ve been really curious here at NeuWrite about what marvelous new life skills Scarlett Johansson will accrue, now that she can use more than 10% of her brain. As forward-thinking neuroscientists, we’ve been speculating: what would Lucy be able to do with such incredible and unprecedented brain power? The […]

November 18

Antidepressants, plasticity, and language development

As an attendee at the 5th annual Society for Neurobiology (SNL) conference, four years had passed since my first exposure to the meeting–a discussion of the state-of-the-art research being done on the neuroscience of language processing. In those four years, things have happened! This meeting left me marveling at new advances and the number of […]

Noise vs song, how are naturalistic stimuli processed in the brain?

One problem encountered in researching sensory systems is that classical stimuli used to probe a sensory system are often not representative of what that system might encounter in the real world. Furthermore it has been difficult to explain the response of neurons to such naturalistic stimuli (such as natural scenes, faces, or speech)  based solely […]