NY Times Article on How Athletes' Brains Process Sound

[mobius017]

I found an article in the NY Times, The Quiet Brain of the Athlete, that I thought people here might find interesting.

Basically, the article discusses how a study found that athletes seem to be better-than-average in their ability to filter out extraneous background noise from all the sounds they hear (whether or not that ability is a result of them being athletes, or they perform better as athletes because they had that ability already, isn't clear).

The athletic component wasn't really what I thought was interesting/would be interesting to folks here, though. I'll include a few quotes below as I discuss those points.

The study finds that the brains of fit, young athletes dial down extraneous noise and attend to important sounds better than those of other young people, suggesting that playing sports may change brains in ways that alter how well people sense and respond to the world around them.

The brains of trained musicians, for instance, tend to show greater spikes in processing activity when they hear the “da” than do the brains of other people, indicating that learning and practicing musicianship also hones and refines the portions of the brain that process sound.

Some of the athletes’ acoustic agility most likely developed during years of attending to crucial sounds despite clatter, Dr. Kraus says. “You have to be able to hear the coach yelling something or what a teammate is saying,” she says. “Brains change in response to that kind of repeated experience,” and the sound-processing components within the brain strengthen.

Between these three snippets, the point I'm getting is that your brain will actually change and adapt itself depending on the kind of work you have it do. As you would expect, practicing the kinds of tasks you do with music should improve your ability to do those tasks (i.e., practice makes perfect). However, the article seems to imply the possibility of a kind of deeper, non-task-specific growth. So, basically, the listening you do while working as a musician (or doing other relevant tasks) also improves your brain's ability to do that kind of listening in the future. So if you've ever thought that you just don't have a musician's ears, or don't think like a musician, it seems like it's possible to develop those basic abilities.

The article also says that simply being fit may have some impact on people's listening abilities, too, though it doesn't give much evidence to support that.

As I'm writing this, this seems less profound than I originally thought it was, but maybe someone will still find benefit in it anyway....

But “making sense of sound is actually one of the most complex jobs we ask of our brains,” says Nina Kraus, a professor and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who oversaw the new study.

This stuck out to me given all the goings-on about AI-driven tools for music production. Nothing really to take away from here, except that processing sound seems like it might be a harder job for AI. Granted, the AI-driven tools we use in our DAWs are probably built to solve specific problems; they don't need to be as concerned about identifying sounds and understanding the difference between a puppy and a mountain lion or something, the way a person might. They just "intelligently" solve much narrower, dumber, more mechanical-type problems.