There's a lot of amazing things about how the brain works, and in this post I'm going to explore the phenomenon of binaural hearing – that is, your brain's amazing ability to hear with both ears ("binaural"), combine the signals, and quickly extract useful information in a way that I think should basically be impossible for the slow meat-computer that it is. Crazy stuff! Here we go!
A quick post tonight – just relating an interesting observation that I made about train whistles.
I set outside and work any time the weather is fair. And in doing so I often hear one of the local trains in the distance blowing their whistle as they cross at an intersection. I realized one day that if you listen carefully, you can tell which direction they're going – toward you or away from you – according to the sound of their whistle. Now obviously, there's the Doppler effect, so that the sound of their whistle is higher pitch if the train is coming towards you and the lower pitch if the train is going away from you. But the Doppler effect by itself isn't that helpful because you (or I at least) don't have perfect pitch and don't know what the normal pitch of a train whistle should be.
I like positing hypotheses that are completely unverified and poorly examined. Why? Because it's easier to play with ideas when you don't have to check your work. 🤣 Here are two somewhat related hypotheses about how evolution has made two very different jiggly things more durable and resistant to distress: your brain and trees.
As many of my friends know, I've picked up neuroscience as a sort of side hobby. (Some people collect stamps, I memorize anatomical structures of the brain.) Last time I blogged about this was regarding my Penny Chat with Stephen Bailey on his work with MRIs. But this week I sat down with one of Stephen's friends David Simon to talk about his research involving Electroencephalography a.k.a. EEG.
Last week I took part in a Medical Imaging study at Vanderbilt in Stephen Bailey's laboratory and lookey at this:
... it's my brain! Yeah, literally, that is my brain! And if you want to know what I think... I think it's a beautiful specimen!
