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PSYC 1504 Written Assignment Unit 7

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42 views4 pages

PSYC 1504 Written Assignment Unit 7

Uploaded by

Cherry Htun
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PSYC 1504 – Introduction to Psychology

University of the People

Study Report
After scrolling through a lot of topics, I came across this article, "How the Brain Understands

One Voice in a Noisy Crowd," which piqued my interest because I've always wondered how I

could catch that one voice in noisy surroundings. Human brains can concentrate their attention

on a single speaker in a crowded place with several people talking, such as a party, a busy

restaurant, or a bus. Edmund Lalor, Ph.D., associate professor of Neuroscience and Biomedical

Engineering at the University of Rochester Medical Center, has been researching how the brain

interprets inputs such as speech, language, and music. His study recently discovered a new hint

as to how the brain might deconstruct the information and deliberately hear one speaker while

neglecting or shutting out another. The brain is actually going out of its way to understand the

words coming from the speaker being listened to, rather than doing so with the other words

whirling around the dialogue. The findings imply that the sounds of both the attended story and

the disregarded story are processed equally, according to Lalor, yet there was a distinct

differential between what followed next in the brain. (Rochester Medical Center, University of

Rochester, 2021).

The study was about figuring out how our brain interprets or listens to a single voice among a

multitude of others. The fundamental goal of this research is to figure out what additional steps

the brains process to recognize that particular voice among numerous sounds, as well as what it

does with the voices it didn't interpret. Participants were picked at random and instructed to

listen to two distinct stories while concentrating intensely on one of them. It was not specified

whether the subjects were men or women, university students or children, implying that this

study may involve anyone. The researchers discovered by using EEG brainwave

measurements that the story that participants were asked to pay attention to was translated into

linguistic units called phonemes, which are sound units that may identify one word from another
when they started listening to the two separate stories while focused exclusively on one,

according to the University of Rochester Medical Center. The findings of this study revealed that

sounds must be identified as relating to particular linguistic classifications like phonemes and

syllables in order to ascertain which words are indeed being uttered, even if they sound different,

such as when uttered by people with various accents or voice pitches. This means that before the

brain converts the single voice it selected to listen to, it must be capable of recognizing the

sounds.

The study, in my opinion, is excellent and will have a significant impact on our society. It was

shown that by using EEG Brainwave signals, the voice being attended to by the brain at any one

time can be determined, which is extremely useful in a variety of fields and potentially vital in

the health sector, such as hearing aids. Not just that, but realizing that interpreting a sound is

important for converting it to phonemes may allow us to understand why individuals don't

always interact with our questions. Rather than assuming they were simply ignoring us, this

research has revealed that they must have misinterpreted the sound they received.

According to the study, the participants were required to listen to two separate stories. This, I

believe, is a limitation of this study because the noise around us is not always made up of stories.

I think the brain reacts differently to tunes and stories, and it may respond even more

significantly if the sound and story are repetitive. Based on these viewpoints, I believe the study

is restricted to the type of noise we are experiencing. I also believe that the lack of participant

identification is a limitation, as the different demographics interpret sound in various manners.

As a result, age, gender, and race should all be considered while selecting subjects.

Based on what I learned in the course regarding stress and how it covers the overall neurological

system, including the brain, I feel it will be more complicated for a Type-A person to attain the
results of this study, as opposed to how easily a Type-B person will interpret and transform the

noises. The reason is that stress can impair the brain's reaction time and cause it to lose

awareness of its surroundings as a result of one or more specified priorities.

Reference

University of Rochester Medical Center. (2021). How the Brain Understands One Voice in a

Noisy Crowd. ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211217113242.htm

Spielman, R., Dumper, K., Jenkins, W., Lacombe, A., Lovett, M. & Perlmutter, M. (2017).

Psychology. OpenStax College, Rice University. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology.

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