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Science & Technology

Man able to hear people before they speak

By T.K. Randall
July 5, 2013 · Comment icon 15 comments

Image Credit: sxc.hu
A 67-year-old man is believed to be the first person to suffer from an audio and visual synching issue.
Despite the brain processing auditory and visual inputs at different rates, it nonetheless manages to compensate so that the two are perceived simultaneously through a mechanism that is not yet fully understood. In the case of the man known only as PH, the two inputs are perceived at different rates by his brain meaning that listening to a conversation is like watching a movie where the audio is not synching up properly with the picture.

PH started to experience symptoms after undergoing surgery. "I said to my daughter 'hey, you've got two TVs that need sorting!'," he said. He soon realised however that it was he who was experiencing things out of synch and that he could actually hear his own voice before his jaw moved when talking.
PH is the first confirmed case of someone who hears people speak before registering that their lips have moved. His situation is giving unique insights into how our brains unify what we hear and see.


Source: New Scientist | Comments (15)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #6 Posted by Lava_Lady 12 years ago
Lol at this post! You can also do it with VLC of course. But MPC-HC is better for the full HD codecs As for the topic/article - it's a bit misleading. He hears things at a semi normal rate but his other senses are delayed. He hears people after they speak. Yeah, I was getting confused about that statement in the title. How can anyone hear another before they speak? Didn't make sense to me... lol I do recall watching an episode of "That's Incredible" as a child where they had this old man saying things apparently before the other person but what it was is that he was hearing everything a split ... [More]
Comment icon #7 Posted by Timonthy 12 years ago
Huh. Recall seeing a distant lightning strike, and then a delay, then hearing the sound? That's normal So, what does he experience in this case? After surgery 'A scan of his brain showed he had two lesions in areas that may play a role in hearing, timing and movement.' 'PH was shown clips of people talking and was asked whether the voice came before or after the lip movements. Sure enough, he said it came before, and to perceive them as synchronous the team had to play the voice about 200 milliseconds later than the lip movements.' So it sounds like his brain is processing sound okay, but sigh... [More]
Comment icon #8 Posted by sam_comm 12 years ago
Geez, if the guy can hear words before they're actually spoken, does it mean that his brain can see what is happening in the futur at a certain level? It would seems so to me, reading this article. That's huge then. He knows what is to be told beforehand, that open doors to scientific studies on the brain's faculty. I get frustrated if i'm watching a movie on my comp and it goes out of sync, i couldn't imagine it all day, every day. So true, it's just very much annoying when you get a video like that out of synch and you can't get it anywhere else!
Comment icon #9 Posted by Timonthy 12 years ago
Geez, if the guy can hear words before they're actually spoken, does it mean that his brain can see what is happening in the futur at a certain level? He cannot hear words before they are spoken. His other senses are delayed ~200ms.
Comment icon #10 Posted by pallidin 12 years ago
Geez, if the guy can hear words before they're actually spoken, does it mean that his brain can see what is happening in the futur at a certain level? It would seems so to me, reading this article. That's huge then. He knows what is to be told beforehand, that open doors to scientific studies on the brain's faculty. Hold on a sec. 200ms to be exact. It's not that he hears words before they are spoken, rather, his internal visual sense is delayed. Thus, it seems that he is hearing sounds before they are actually produced, but that is not the case at all.
Comment icon #11 Posted by madduke 12 years ago
Poor guy. He has to live life in a bad kung-fu movie.
Comment icon #12 Posted by GirlfromOz 12 years ago
Very interesting.
Comment icon #13 Posted by chopmo 12 years ago
guh another codec update -_-
Comment icon #14 Posted by Cherry- 12 years ago
i wanna meet this guy
Comment icon #15 Posted by Timonthy 12 years ago
i wanna meet this guy Why?


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