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Science & Environment

Brain's party noise filter revealed by

recordings
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

20 December 2016 Science & Environment Share

UC BERKELEY

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Brain's party noise filter revealed by recordings - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38381915

Direct recordings have revealed what is happening in our brains

as we make sense of speech in a noisy room.

Focusing on one conversation in a loud, distracting environment is

called "the cocktail party effect".

It is a common festive phenomenon and of interest to researchers

seeking to improve speech recognition technology.

Neuroscientists recorded from people's brains during a test that

recreated the moment when unintelligible speech suddenly makes
sense.

A team measured people's brain activity as the words of a previously

unintelligible sentence suddenly became clear when a subject was
told the meaning of the "garbled speech".

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Lead researcher Christopher Holdgraf from the University of

California, Berkeley, and his colleagues were able to work with
epilepsy patients, who had had a portion of their skull removed and
electrodes placed on the brain surface to track their seizures.

Seven of these subjects took part in the scientists' auditory test.

Filtering the noise

Can you understand these phrases? Researchers used this audio to work out what

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Brain's party noise filter revealed by recordings - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38381915

happens in our brains when we suddenly make sense of speech

First, the researchers played a very distorted, garbled sentence to

each subject, which almost no-one was able to understand. They
then played a normal, easy to understand version of the same
sentence and immediately repeated the garbled version.

"After hearing the intact sentence" the researchers explained in their

paper, all the subjects understood the subsequent "noisy version".

The brain recordings showed this moment of recognition as brain

activity patterns in the areas of the brain that are known to be
associated with processing sound and understanding speech.

When the subjects heard the very garbled sentence, the scientists
reported that they saw little activity in those parts of the brain.

Hearing the clearly understandable sentence then triggered patterns

of activity in those brain areas.

The scientific revelation was seeing how that then altered the nature
of the brain's response when the subject heard the distorted, garbled
phrase again. Auditory and speech processing areas then "lit up" and
changed their pattern of activity over time, apparently tuning in to the
words among the distortion.

"The brain actually changes the way it focuses on different parts of

the sound," explained the researchers. "When patients heard the
clear sentences first, the auditory cortex (the part of the brain
associated with processing sound) enhanced the speech signal."

Mr Holdgraf said: "We're starting to look for more subtle or complex

relationships between the brain activity and the sound.

"Rather than just looking at 'up or down', it's looking at the details of
how the brain activity changes across time, and how that activity
relates to features in the sound.

This, he added, gets closer to the mechanisms behind perception.

"By understanding the ways in which our brains filter out noise in the
world, the researcher concluded, "we hope to be able to create
devices that help people with speech and hearing impediments
accomplish the same thing."

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Brain's party noise filter revealed by recordings - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38381915

"It is unbelievable how fast and plastic the brain is," added co-author
Prof Robert Knight. "[And] this is the first time we have any evidence
on how it actually works in humans."

Prof Knight and his colleagues are aiming to use the findings to
develop a speech decoder, a brain implant to interpret people's
imagined speech, which could help those with certain
neurodegenerative diseases that affect their ability to speak.

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Related Internet links

Chris Holdgraf - Berkeley Institute for Data Science

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