How the Brain Edits Are Hearing to Help Navigate the Real World

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Diana's allusion is explicitly designed to fool the brain into making a wrong guess. The brain reorganizes the sounds in space in accordance with this interpretation. This kind of brain editing would normally help you make sense of the world. Right handers tend to hear high tones on the right side. But for left handers it's more complicated. They're likelier than other people to hear hightones on the left or even weirder ways.

In the same way optical illusions trick our eyes, audio illusions can trick our ears. This raises a fundamental question: What is hearing, and how much of it is made up by our brains?

This is the first episode of our new six-part series, Making Sense.

You can find more of Diana Deutsch’s auditory illusions at https://bit.ly/3Mdh6H4, Matthew Winn's research at http://www.mattwinn.com/Research.html, and Mike Chorost's writing at https://michaelchorost.com

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