Neural Correlates of Auditory Object Perception

As you sit in front of this book, reading these words, pause for a moment, listen, and ask yourself: What do I hear? Perhaps you hear some conversations going on in the background, some devices making noises of various kinds (an almost omnipresent feature of the modern world). Or perhaps you are in an unusually quiet place, and there is effectively nothing to hear. Almost certain is that you would not describe your auditory experience as one of oscillating air pressure in your ear canals that gently wiggle your ear drums. Yet strictly speaking, on the surface of it, that is all there ever is to “hearing.” What makes hearing so rich is that brains display a remarkable ability to, in a sense, “reconstruct” the very sources that have produced the vibration patterns that arrive at the ears, and by the time an auditory event impinges on a listener’s consciousness they are essentially unaware of sound waves, but instead hear—well— “something.” What that thing is may be quite clear and easily put into words: a bicycle bell perhaps, or a voice. Note how readily people, when asked to identify a particular sound, might answer: “a telephone” or “a dripping tap” even though neither phones nor taps are, of course, sounds. Sounds are not things, yet people appear to try very hard to perceive them as such. Even when one cannot unambiguously identify a