
New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations - uptown
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cant-hear-in-noisy-places-its-a-real-medical-condition-1474909624
======
rconti
One interesting phenomenon I once noticed was my own ability to combine lip
reading and auditory performance.

I was at a basketball game, on the 2nd level, and of course could not hear
what was happening on the bench due to crowd noise. But when I watched the
coach through binoculars, suddenly I could hear what she was saying. I'd never
have guessed I had any ability to lip-read whatsoever, but I was blown away by
my brain's ability in that regard.

~~~
gizmo686
This is closely related to the McGurk effect [0], which deals with our
perception when the audio of one sound is shown with video of another sound
being produced.

The canonical example of this is a video of saying /ga/ combined with the
audio of saying /ba/ tends to produce the perception of hearing /da/

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw)

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enraged_camel
I actually got annoyed at my roommate last night because he was washing dishes
while I was trying to watch a movie. The sound of running water totally messed
up my ability to understand the movie (unless I turned up the volume quite a
bit, and we have neighbors...), so I had to pause it until he was done.

I always thought it was just me - I'm not a native speaker - but it's
interesting to know that it's an actual medical condition.

~~~
wyldfire
I'm not convinced that I suffer from this but for years now I've enabled
subtitles/captions in order to follow along. Helps with ambient noise, accents
in the dialogue, otherwise inaudible dialogue, plus sometimes there's
interesting ad-libs/changes from original script.

Might not help for a non-native English speaker unless the titles are in your
language though, YMMV.

~~~
techdmn
I do this too, a habit picked up when my kids were little and I didn't want to
wake them up with loud movies. I'm surprised now, when I turn captions off,
how much harder I have to concentrate on what I'm watching in order to keep
track of what's going on.

~~~
rconti
I have the opposite problem. Whether voice+caps are in my language, or the
caps are a translation to my native language with a spoken (foreign) language
that I understand fine, I CANNOT stop myself from reading every word of the
captions, so it really limits my enjoyment of the video portion of the film.

------
rzzzt
If you would like to go on a Wikipedia journey on related topics, I recommend
these two articles:

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Kopetzky_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Kopetzky_syndrome)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect)

~~~
AceJohnny2
King-Kopetsky syndrome. Damnit, so that's what it could be. Gotta have that
checked out.

------
Semaphor
Wow. Good to know I'm not just going crazy. I score above average on hearing
tests, being able to hear higher frequency tones even with 30, but I already
have problems hearing someone talking into a direction away from me.

~~~
Grishnakh
Yep, I've had this problem forever. Close relatives think I'm deaf before I
can't understand them when there's a lot of ambient noise or they aren't
speaking clearly, even though I can hear everything else just fine (and have
always been very protective of my hearing). There's apparently no way I can
convince them otherwise. In American culture, if you can't easily understand
people speaking in a whisper in an extremely loud bar, then you're assumed to
be hard of hearing.

~~~
dghughes
Hearing loss can start with the inability to hear consonants in words.

My mother has it but won't get it checked and won't get a hearing aid. The
slightest bit of noise to her is like the world is roaring and we are all
mumbling.

I also worked with a guy who had almost no hearing in one ear and he was
similar where any bit of noise and that was it he was gone no longer able to
hear.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2787079/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2787079/)

I have experience the other way I worked evening shifts in a casino and I
learned to hear through noise through crowds and could understand a person. I
could hear someone ten feet away in a roaring crowd most times I could tell
they were looking for help but I could hear them too.

~~~
Grishnakh
Noise doesn't bother me, I just can't understand spoken speech if there's too
much of it. It's always been this way, so I'm getting really sick and tired of
all the assholes telling me I'm developing hearing loss. I've always been able
to hear CRT monitors at a long distance, which most "normal" people can't. If
you can't hear 15.75kHz, as far as I'm concerned, _you 're_ the one who's
deaf.

~~~
dghughes
That doesn't matter if you can hear the the whine of a CRT you can have
hearing loss in a specific frequency.

We all have hearing loss as adults just past our teens we all lose the low
20Hz end and the high 20KHz end of our hearing that's normal.

My mother said as a teenager she listened to her transistor by holding it
against her left ear. Now she can't hear high sounds out of her left ear but
she can hear mid range and low range sounds perfectly.

I don't think anyone is trying to be an asshole. It's strange how we as a
society can't say to a person you may have hearing loss but we can say to a
person your eyes are bad maybe you need glasses.

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aisofteng
This article tangentially mentions something I've long held, as a privately
thought, as essential to the study of and eventual understanding of what
defines sentience.

There is a fundamental difference between distinguishing stimuli and
_choosing_ to distinguish stimuli. There is clearly a physical basis for fine
detection and discrimination of auditory stimuli, whose mechanics lie in the
ear, hair cells, auditory cortex, and so on, and these are fundamental to the
ability to navigate a _very_ stimulus-ridden world.

However, the ability to _choose_ which stimuli to _pay attention to_ is, I
feel, key to understanding sentience. Any system can respond to stimuli - not
any system can _choose_ which stimuli to respond to. Understanding that
ability of choice - that is, the process of attention - will be, I feel, a key
step towards understanding sentience (and, eventually, how our own minds
work).

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zeta0134
I can't read this article without paying for a subscription.

Forgive my ignorance of procedure with something like this; should the title
perhaps include an indication that the article is not free? I didn't see any
guidelines concerning paid / subscription articles in the FAQ.

~~~
ludamad
I'm not sure if it's documented, but for WSJ you can click the 'web' link, or
do the equivalent of what the web link does.

~~~
enraged_camel
This only works if the search term matches the title exactly. For instance,
when the submission still had its original title (which matched the article's
title), it worked. Then someone edited it and it now doesn't work. You have to
open the article, select the title, right click > Search Google, then click
the result from there.

~~~
khedoros1
Bleh. I just tried it in three different browsers and hit the paywall each
time. It's too bad, I've had this condition for years. I guess I'll have to do
my own reading on the side.

