An unusual feature found in human hearing

If you speed up the audio track, it seems logical that the brain would start working faster. However, a new study by scientists from the University of Rochester and Columbia University showed the opposite: the auditory cortex processes speech in a fixed time window, regardless of its speed. The work is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The authors worked with patients who had electrodes temporarily implanted to monitor epilepsy. Participants were played the same excerpt from an audiobook at normal and slowed-down tempos. It was expected that neurons would change their "integration window" for information, but it remained the same - approximately 100 milliseconds.

"When you slow down a word, the auditory cortex doesn't stretch its analysis time. It continues to process the signal at a fixed scale, and then higher brain regions interpret the resulting stream to understand words and phrases," explained one of the study's authors, Sam Norman-Haignere.

According to co-author Nima Mesgarani from Columbia University, this discovery breaks the conventional understanding that the brain adapts to the structure of speech - syllables and words. In reality, it uses its own "internal metronome."