The Sound Barrier is a four-episode series where we explore the limits of hearing and the ways we can break through.

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Hysell V. Oviedo, Washington University in St. Louis (THE CONVERSATION) Some of the ...

(A) Mice are trained to respond to external audiovisual cues by making decisions to receive a water reward while avoiding a mild air puff. When both auditory and visual stimuli are presented together, ...

What is silence, exactly? In quiet moments, does the brain register silence the same way it hears, say, music? Or does it demarcate silence as the gaps between noises? Psychologists and philosophers ...

Babies’ brains track their mother’s voice more closely than a stranger’s, shifting how they register faces and focus ...

As people drift into sleep, their brains do not shut down all at once. Instead, different brain regions change their activity ...

Does walking influence how people process sensory information, like sounds, from the environment? In a new JNeurosci paper, researchers led by Liyu Cao, from Zhejiang University, and Barbara Händel, ...

Hysell V Oviedo receives funding from NIH. Your brain breaks apart fleeting streams of acoustic information into parallel channels – linguistic, emotional and musical – and acts as a biological ...