Speech and echoes – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Brain Mastery Over Echoes Enhances Speech Clarity

Researchers have uncovered the human brain’s remarkable ability to segregate direct speech from echoes, a challenge that has long perplexed audio engineers. It was discovered through magnetoencephalography (MEG) that despite the distortion caused by echoes, which typically lag by at least 100 milliseconds, the brain processes and understands speech with over 95% accuracy by separating the sound into distinct streams. This separation occurs even without active attention from the listener, indicating an innate brain function facilitating clear speech perception in echoic environments. ….[READ]