How Your Hands Impact Your Hearing

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have discovered how the left and right hemispheres of the brain process auditory information differently. Researchers hope the newly discovered link between motor skills and perception will eventually lead to breakthroughs in how language disorders are treated.

Peter Turkeltaub, MD, PhD, one of the lead researchers in the study had this to say about the research and its findings:

We asked the subjects to respond to sounds hidden in background noise. Each subject was told to use their right hand to respond during the first 20 sounds, then their left hand for the next 20 second, then right, then left, and so on. When a subject was using their right hand, they heard the rapidly changing sounds more often than when they used their left hand, and vice versa for the slowly changing sounds. Since the left hemisphere controls the right hand and vice versa, these results demonstrate that the two hemispheres specialize in different kinds of sounds—the left hemisphere likes rapidly changing sounds, such as consonants, and the right hemisphere likes slowly changing sounds, such as syllables or intonation. These results also demonstrate the interaction between motor systems and perception. It’s really pretty amazing. Imagine you’re waving an American flag while listening to one of the presidential candidates. The speech will actually sound slightly different to you depending on whether the flag is in your left hand or your right hand.

If we can understand the basic brain organization for audition, this might ultimately lead to new treatments for people who have speech recognition problems due to stroke or other brain injury. Understanding better the specific roles of the two hemispheres in auditory processing will be a big step in that direction. If we find that people with aphasia, who typically have injuries to the left hemisphere, have difficulty recognizing speech because of problems with low-level auditory perception of rapidly changing sounds, maybe training the specific auditory processing deficits will improve their ability to recognize speech.

For the source of this article and more information about Dr. Turkeltaub's research, click here.


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