14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study, conducted by researchers at McGill University and led by Department of Psychology neuroscientist David Ostry, shows that the way we hear voices or other sounds depends on how our facial muscles are contracted, or if we speak or are quiet at the time we hear those sounds. The finds, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that stretching skin in various directions thoroughly influences how and what people hear when talking to others.
The experiment was conducted on some 75 American English native speakers, who were asked to sit down and relax, while listening to random selections from two words, “head” and “had.” The scientists applied tiny robotic arms on their faces, which pulled their skin in configurations that usually occurred when someone was talking. The participants were asked to remain completely still while the robots rearranged their faces, but were required to listen to the word they heard very carefully.
Ostroy, alongside colleagues from MIT's Haskins Laboratories and Research Laboratories of Electronics, asked each of the persons to speak out what word they heard the computer say. The researchers noted that when their skin was pulled downwards, all the words they heard resembled “had,” regardless if it was this word or the other one. The same held true for upwards stretching. All words the subjects heard tended to sound more like “head.” The team noticed no visible difference in perception when skin was stretched backwards.
“Our study provides clues on how the brain processes speech. There is a broad non-auditory basis to speech perception. This study indicates that perception has neural links to the mechanisms of speech production,” Ostroy explains.
The test subjects themselves were amazed at the difference in perception, and said that they had no idea that this type of sound manipulation can occur while talking to someone else. They maintained that the phenomenon could be the main reason for many of their fights with other people, when each party said something and the other one heard only what he or she wanted.