How does your brain decode garbled speech?

When you're suddenly able to understand someone despite their thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain appears to be re-tuning to recognize speech that was previously incomprehensible.
University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person's brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found.
The observations confirm speculation that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language - the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes - continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment.
The findings will aid Knight and his colleagues in their quest to develop a speech decoder: a device implanted in the brain that would interpret people's imagined speech and help speechless patients, such as those paralyzed by Lou Gehrig's disease, communicate.
Holdgraf, Knight, Theunissen and their colleagues will report their findings Dec. 20 in the journal Nature Communications.
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Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally
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[@maljamin]

Once you hear something intelligible it refocuses so, you can probably also pick out the sound out of white noise after that, and call that white noise "intelligible" (if you're sufficiently flexible or have a vivid imagination at the moment). Audio Rorschach. Similarly, and this would be cool - if we could come up with sounds that are "averages" between two others, then the same audio could sound like 2 different phrases depending on which one you heard most recently.

[@useresu301]

why do you look horrified throughout the video?

[@gigglygoop7659]

He looks garbled

[@educacionuniversal7315]

Excellent university

[@UrgeidoitNet]

keep it up, i dig this!

[@r0j1j1]

please blink

[@SlyHikari03]

How do you make the audio like that?

[@nezainex5295]

👍👍👍

[@natela_mk]

Open your eyes like 10% less.