We hear what we think we’ll hear…

Do we expect to hear what we think we’ll hear? Our brain is a marvellous, wonderful and consistently interesting thing! Learning more about what makes it tick is one of the keys to understanding how we can change our homes and offices to make them better spaces for us.

As you might have anticipated, neuroscientists affiliated with Technische Universitat Dresden found that we “hear” what we expect to hear.

A TU Dresden press release reports that “neuroscience research has revealed that the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.. . . new findings . . . show that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.. . .

Dr. Alejandro Tabas, first author of the publication, states on the findings: ‘Our subjective beliefs on the physical world have a decisive role on how we perceive reality. . . . All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world.’”

“We Hear What We Expect to Hear.”  2021.  Press release, Technische Universitat Dresden, https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/menschen-hoeren-das-was…