A new study by the University of California, San Fran, reported that the team had identified specialized brain cells that help the individual to understand what a speaker really means, concentrating on the way he does it. Those cells also keep track of changes in the pitch of the voice of our vis-a-vis.
According to the researchers, those neurons enable us to detect the melody of speech, while others are focussing on identifying vowels and consonants. The intonation is important to us since the same sentence can have multiple meanings without changing a single word. The team studied the brains of ten epilepsy-patients prior to surgery, via electrodes that were placed temporarily on their brains’ surfaces, which helped the surgeons identify the source of their seizures, and allowed the team to monitor the activity of the cells in the individual brain, as the test-subjects listened to a series of sentences spoken by a computer. The computer-voice was modified in terms of intonation, so the participants would hear different versions of one sentence; the cells that were observed to track the pitches did not care about the “gender” and highness of the voice, but the pattern of the pitch changes.
Processing sounds is one of the most complex tasks of our brain; it’s a skill that some people learn better than others, too. Musicians, for example, were seen to recognize subtle tonal changes in Mandarin Chinese better than non-musicians, although they wre English-speaking. Furthermore, this ability is often impaired in people with autism, therefor they hear what one says, but not how they mean it.