USE YOUR EARS

Seeing with Your Ears: A Wondrous Journey Across the Senses

We will briefly describe here a few studies that challenge this theory. Using a special method, named “sensory substitution,” researchers have been able to demonstrate that blind people could “see” using sounds. Using a brain scanner, they showed that those brain areas, thought to have lost their ability to process visual information, play a central role in the ability to “see using sound” and ...

Music Imagery Information Retrieval Bringing the Song on Your Mind Back to Your Ears

Most existing Music Information Retrieval (MIR) technologies require a user to use a query interface to search for a musical document. The mental image of the desired music is likely much richer than what the user is able to express through any query interface. This expressivity bottleneck could be circumvented if it was possible to directly read the music query from the user’s mind. To the aut...

Extent of cotton-bud use in ears.

Nagal and colleagues again raise ENT surgeons’ concerns about the use of cottonbuds in the ear canal.1 As a GP I have always counselled against the use of cotton buds in this way. However I have comparatively rarely seen complications. If 68% of the population are using cottonbuds in the ear it seems that complications of this practice, as a proportion of the number of times it is performed, mu...

Seeing Emotion with Your Ears: Emotional Prosody Implicitly Guides Visual Attention to Faces

Interpersonal communication involves the processing of multimodal emotional cues, particularly facial expressions (visual modality) and emotional speech prosody (auditory modality) which can interact during information processing. Here, we investigated whether the implicit processing of emotional prosody systematically influences gaze behavior to facial expressions of emotion. We analyzed the e...

How to Use Your Mind