A study examining how the brain decodes pitch could inform further development of cochlear implants.
Picture yourself with a friend in a crowded restaurant. The din of other diners, the clattering of dishes, the muffled notes of background music, the voice of your friend, not to mention your own - all compete for your brain's attention. For many people, the brain can automatically distinguish the noises, identifying the sources and recognizing what they "say” and mean thanks to, among other features of sound, pitch. But for someone who wears a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted electronic device that restores a sense of hearing, pitch is only weakly conveyed. For decades, scientists have debated how, exactly, humans perceive pitch, and how the ear and the brain transmit pitch information in a sound. There are two prevalent theories: place and time. The "time code" theory argues that pitch is a matter of auditory nerve fiber firing rate, while the "place code" theory focuses on where in the inner ear a sound activates.
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