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New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

wsj.com

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Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#11

Post by techdmn »

wyldfire wrote: post #9
enraged_camel wrote: post #5

I actually got annoyed at my roommate last night because he was washing dishes while I was trying to watch a movie. The sound of running water totally messed up my ability to understand the movie (unless I turned up the volume quite a bit, and we have neighbors...), so I had to pause it until he was done. I always thought it was just me - I'm not a native speaker - but it's interesting to know that it's an actual med…

I'm not convinced that I suffer from this but for years now I've enabled subtitles/captions in order to follow along. Helps with ambient noise, accents in the dialogue, otherwise inaudible dialogue, plus sometimes there's interesting ad-libs/changes from original script. Might not help for a non-native English speaker unless the titles are in your language though, YMMV.

I do this too, a habit picked up when my kids were little and I didn't want to wake them up with loud movies. I'm surprised now, when I turn captions off, how much harder I have to concentrate on what I'm watching in order to keep track of what's going on.

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#12

Post by foopityfop »

zeta0134 wrote: post #2

I can't read this article without paying for a subscription. Forgive my ignorance of procedure with something like this; should the title perhaps include an indication that the article is not free? I didn't see any guidelines concerning paid / subscription articles in the FAQ.

Try googling the article name and opening it from the search results.

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#13

Post by uptown »

enraged_camel wrote: post #6
ludamad wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's documented, but for WSJ you can click the 'web' link, or do the equivalent of what the web link does.

This only works if the search term matches the title exactly. For instance, when the submission still had its original title (which matched the article's title), it worked. Then someone edited it and it now doesn't work. You have to open the article, select the title, right click > Search Google, then click the result from there.

I submitted it with the appropriate title. Not sure why it was changed.

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#14

Post by rconti »

techdmn wrote: post #11
wyldfire wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that I suffer from this but for years now I've enabled subtitles/captions in order to follow along. Helps with ambient noise, accents in the dialogue, otherwise inaudible dialogue, plus sometimes there's interesting ad-libs/changes from original script. Might not help for a non-native English speaker unless the titles are in your language though, YMMV.

I do this too, a habit picked up when my kids were little and I didn't want to wake them up with loud movies. I'm surprised now, when I turn captions off, how much harder I have to concentrate on what I'm watching in order to keep track of what's going on.

I have the opposite problem. Whether voice+caps are in my language, or the caps are a translation to my native language with a spoken (foreign) language that I understand fine, I CANNOT stop myself from reading every word of the captions, so it really limits my enjoyment of the video portion of the film.

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#15

Post by rconti »

One interesting phenomenon I once noticed was my own ability to combine lip reading and auditory performance.

I was at a basketball game, on the 2nd level, and of course could not hear what was happening on the bench due to crowd noise. But when I watched the coach through binoculars, suddenly I could hear what she was saying. I'd never have guessed I had any ability to lip-read whatsoever, but I was blown away by my brain's ability in that regard.

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#17

Post by acbabis »

weinzierl wrote: post #10
ludamad wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's documented, but for WSJ you can click the 'web' link, or do the equivalent of what the web link does.

What is the 'web' link?

The link near the top of this page (HackerNews) that says "web". It's in an easy-to-miss list of light grey links.

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#18

Post by gizmo686 »

rconti wrote: post #15

One interesting phenomenon I once noticed was my own ability to combine lip reading and auditory performance. I was at a basketball game, on the 2nd level, and of course could not hear what was happening on the bench due to crowd noise. But when I watched the coach through binoculars, suddenly I could hear what she was saying. I'd never have guessed I had any ability to lip-read whatsoever, but I was blown away by my…

This is closely related to the McGurk effect [0], which deals with our perception when the audio of one sound is shown with video of another sound being produced.

The canonical example of this is a video of saying /ga/ combined with the audio of saying /ba/ tends to produce the perception of hearing /da/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#19

Post by DanBC »

zeta0134 wrote: post #2

I can't read this article without paying for a subscription. Forgive my ignorance of procedure with something like this; should the title perhaps include an indication that the article is not free? I didn't see any guidelines concerning paid / subscription articles in the FAQ.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Re: New studies of the brain’s ability to decode words in loud situations

#20

Post by Grishnakh »

Semaphor wrote: post #16

Wow. Good to know I'm not just going crazy. I score above average on hearing tests, being able to hear higher frequency tones even with 30, but I already have problems hearing someone talking into a direction away from me.

Yep, I've had this problem forever. Close relatives think I'm deaf before I can't understand them when there's a lot of ambient noise or they aren't speaking clearly, even though I can hear everything else just fine (and have always been very protective of my hearing). There's apparently no way I can convince them otherwise. In American culture, if you can't easily understand people speaking in a whisper in an extremely loud bar, then you're assumed to be hard of hearing.
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