The Auditory Brain – With Seth Horowitz

We are all embedded in an unending ocean of sound, a rich stream of information that can be important, trivial, distracting or even dangerous. 350 million years of evolution has led us to develop an intimate relationship with sound that lets our brains sense, perceive and decide in which of categories a sound falls, all in less than a tenth of the time it takes us to see something. This is why hearing underlies some of the most complex cognitive and behavioral processes that we do, and why it provides a powerful, yet frequently ignored, tool for changing those processes.

- In evolutionary terms, hearing is a universal sense – there are no normally deaf vertebrates. It is highly adaptive to hear because sound lets you usefully detect what is going on at great distances even out of line of sight.
- Hearing is a mechanical sense – it has the fewest processes between the sensation and the perception.
- Hearing is the fastest sense; understanding it gives you a sense of the math behind the mind.
- How working with sound lets us act on with specific elements and processes of the brain and mind, much more so than any other sense.