Picking Out Speech from Background Noise is Easy for Musical Brains

A new study has said that you can learn playing an instrument to enhance your ability to pick up emotional cues in conversation.

Nina Kraus and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has found differences in brain activity that they say make musicians better at picking out speech from background noise.

Stuttering
Stuttering, stammering or disfluency is a speech disorder that can hamper communication and affect a person’s quality of life. Its impact can be treated effectively by stuttering therapy.

The researchers found that musicians are better at repeating a sentence heard in the presence of background noise.

They then asked 16 lifelong musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to speech in a quiet or noisy environment while they were wearing scalp electrodes to monitor their brain activity.

Background noise delayed the brain's response, but this delay was much shorter in musicians.

Presbycusis (Age-related Hearing Loss)-Causes-Symptoms-Diagnosis-Treatment-FAQs
Presbycusis (age related hearing loss) is the gradual loss of hearing that occurs as people get older. Presbycusis involves progressive sensorineural hearing loss.

Besides, in the noisy environment, the musicians' brainwaves were more similar to the sound waves of the speech than in non-musicians.

The difference could be partly genetic, but Kraus says training is likely to help.

Minor Genetic Variation Could Be The Key That Enables Human Speech
Two minute changes in a gene that is otherwise identical in humans and chimps could explain why we have full-fledged power of speech while other primates can only grunt or screech, say scientists.

"Musicians spend a lot of time extracting particular sounds from a soundscape," New Scientist quoted her as saying.

This means that musical training could provide real benefits to children with autism or language difficulties, who tend to find understanding speech in a noisy environment particularly difficult, and for other children too, says Kraus.

Scientists Find Why Dyslexic Kids Face Difficulties in Distinguishing Speech from Noise
The mechanism behind why children with dyslexia often have difficulty hearing someone talk in a noisy room has been discovered in a new study.

"Music education is not just about teaching your child how to play the flute, it's about teaching your child to function better in our noisy auditory environment," she said.

The study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Source-ANI
RAS