Category: Silence
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Copying sounds. Speaking?
Bats can learn to mimic specific sounds, which puts them into an elite group of animals capable of this. Studying how bats can copy noises could help us learn more about humans’ unique capacity for speech and language. (1) Listen. Speak. Oh child. How did you learn to speak? If not by listening to people…
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Old mummy… Silent voices…
The sound of a vocal tract from a 3,000-year-old mummy has been recreated using CT scans, a 3D-printer, and a voice synthesizer. Details of this achievement—such as it is—were published in Scientific Reports. (1) Old voices. Lost voices. Meaning nothing now. Frightening isn’t it? Why don’t we understand those voices? Why do we need to?…
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Understanding language. Word by word…
The capacity for language is distinctly human. It allows us to communicate, learn things, create culture, and think better. Because of its complexity, scientists have long struggled to understand the neurobiology of language. In the classical view, there are two major language areas in the left half of our brain. Broca’s area (in the frontal…
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Reading. Seeing. Seeing better!
Reading is a recent invention in the history of human culture — too recent for dedicated brain networks to have evolved specifically for it. How, then, do we accomplish this remarkable feat? As we learn to read, a brain region known as the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA) becomes sensitive to script (letters or characters).…
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Speaking AI… Silent logos…
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a framework for building deep neural networks via grammar-guided network generators. In experimental testing, the new networks (called AOGNets) have outperformed existing state-of-the-art frameworks, including the widely-used ResNet and DenseNet systems, in visual recognition tasks. “AOGNets have better prediction accuracy than any of the networks we’ve compared it…
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