On 2/5/2012 3:25 PM, Stuart wrote:

You know, I saw on the TV news a couple nights ago, a piece about some
work done in the U.S. regarding brain activity measurements in response to
the spoken word. A computer translating into sound the electrical activity
caused by words spoken to the patient. First they played a direct sound
recording of the speaker and then the computer interpretation of the
"brainwaves".

I would love to know what, if any, brain activity there is, to sound
frequencies above the patients normal hearing range. It could settle the
argument once and for all.

Suppose a pure tone was played, let's say 5kHz and then with harmonics
added one by one. With second third, and fourth possibly, depending on the
age of the patient, one might expect a different pattern but what about
higher.

Needless to say, care would have to be taken in the design of the
headphones used to ensure they could not affect the result.

Using the human ear in this way, as measuring instrument, could have some
quite interesting results though we would have to improve on current
techniques, which require the skull to be opened up for brain surgery!

Actually, that was done about ten years back and presented as a paper to
AES:

http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full

As with all religious arguments, the paper has it proponents and
detractors ... why I didn't mention it previously.

That no one has been able to successfully duplicate it, not that anyone
has tried to the same extent ... makes it almost like a climate change
debate.

But, there has also been some new developments with bone conductivity of
HFC that compliments the human ear in making use of it.

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