Source: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
"Scientists from Maastricht University have developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said. With the help of neuroimaging and data mining techniques the researchers mapped the brain activity associated with the recognition of speech sounds and voices. In their Science article ”Who” is Saying “What”? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique 'neural fingerprint' in the listener's brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition."
..could be used to improve computer systems.. Yes, most probably. But what I see striking in the above news is the fact that - said now by me in a very plain non-scientific way - our brain visualizes, builds, creates different images based on who's talking. How far can this be imagined further - the behaviour of the teacher affecting the direction of the image building in our brain??!
I see this a fascinating snapshot toward including some neuroscience in our learning life after the #cck08.
Some more food for imagination:
"People have long envisaged the brain as being like a computer on standby, lying dormant until called upon to do a task, such as solving a Sudoku, reading a newspaper, or looking for a face in a crowd. Sokoloff's experiment (1953) provided the first glimpse of a different truth: that the brain enjoys a rich private life. This amazing organ, which accounts for only 2 per cent of our body mass but devours 20 per cent of the calories we eat, fritters away much of that energy doing, as far as we can tell, absolutely nothing.
--All of this has been a long time coming since Sokoloff's surprising observation 55 years ago. Watching the brain at rest, rather than constantly prodding it to do tricks, is now revealing the rich inner world of our private moments. So the next time you're mooching around doing nothing much, take a moment to remind yourself that your brain is still beavering away - if you can tear yourself away from your daydreams, that is."
Source of the above quote and the following picture: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026811.500-the-secret-life-of-the-brain.html?full=true
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