Five facts about hearing that will reveal the secrets of sound perceptionComputer: I've translated the Russian text into English as requested, maintaining the original structure while providing an accurate translation.

Why we don't like our voice on recordings and if there's a difference between the right and left ear.

1. We don't like our voice in recordings for a reason

When we say something, our voice reaches our ears in two main ways:

Through the air. Sound waves created by our vocal cords first enter the ear canal, then travel through the outer ear canal. They cause the eardrum to vibrate and are transmitted through the ossicles in the middle ear to the cochlea in the inner ear. This is how we hear all external sounds.

Through the bones. Vibrations from the vocal cords are transmitted through the skull bones directly to the cochlea in the inner ear. The bone tissue of the head enhances them with deeper low-frequency components, which makes our voice sound deeper and richer to us.

When we listen to a recording of our conversation or singing, only the first pathway is involved. The absence of bone conduction causes the sound on audio to seem higher than we're used to. This discrepancy between expectation and reality can cause a feeling of discomfort or dislike of our voice in recordings.

2. Perfect pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages

Perfect pitch is a rare ability of a person to accurately identify or reproduce musical notes without any external reference. And it is significantly more common among speakers of tonal languages - for example, Chinese or Vietnamese.

In such languages, the meaning of a word depends not only on its sound composition but also on the tone with which it is pronounced. For example, in Chinese, the syllable "ma" can mean "mother," "horse," "hemp," or "to scold" depending on the intonation. Such a language structure requires speakers to have increased sensitivity to pitch from an early age.

At the University of California, San Diego, an experiment was conducted comparing the auditory abilities of students from the Beijing Conservatory and students from the music school in Rochester, USA. It turned out that among those who began studying music at the age of 4-5 years, 60% of Chinese participants had perfect pitch compared to only 14% of Americans.

3. While asleep, we hear all sounds, but the brain filters them

Even when we sleep, our hearing continues to work, picking up all surrounding sounds. During this time, the brain acts as a kind of filter, suppressing most of them so they don't interfere with rest. It is configured to ignore background sounds while instantly responding to potentially important or threatening signals. That's why we can sleep through the monotonous noise of rain or the hum of a fan, but easily wake up to our own name whispered, the sound of an alarm clock, or a baby crying.

Research shows that during REM sleep, the brain is particularly sensitive to words, whereas it most often ignores meaningless sets of sounds. This confirms that it continues to analyze information and extract what's important from it.

Thanks to this mechanism, a person remains safe: the ears still work as an early warning system, but the brain spares us from having to constantly wake up at every rustle.

4. Hearing loss increases the risk of developing dementia

There are several factors that affect our cognitive functions when we start to hear poorly:

Reduced auditory stimulation of the brain. When we lose hearing, the brain receives fewer stimuli from the surrounding world. This can lead to the areas responsible for sound processing beginning to atrophy or work less efficiently. As a result, the risk of problems with memory, attention, and other cognitive functions increases.

Social isolation. Hearing problems make communication difficult. When a person finds it difficult to understand the speech of others, they may begin to avoid social contacts. And a wide circle of communication is actually one of the means of preventing dementia.

Increased load on the brain. With hearing loss, it is forced to make additional efforts to decode sound information, which can lead to fatigue and, over time, to a decrease in cognitive reserves.

5. Right and left ears perceive sounds differently

Our hearing is arranged so that each ear transmits information to the opposite part of the brain. That is, noises detected by the right ear are processed in the left hemisphere, and those entering the left ear are processed in the right hemisphere. This division plays an important role in how we perceive speech, music, and ambient sounds.

The left hemisphere