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mrxexon t1_jdwh9lm wrote

"Hear" needs to be defined. It's not just the physical mechanism.

Provided your hearing is perfect, you are still bottlenecked in the brain. The reason being is your brain sorts out what you're focused on and excludes everything else to the best of it's ability. This is what allows you to concentrate on something in a noisy office, etc. But there is a limit.

The limit is in your conciousness. You only have no much of it and it doesn't divide very well. Each sound would require it's own attention and humans just aren't wired that way. In theory, you could train yourself to some degree but it's still an uphill battle.

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ZaneJayMusic t1_jdwkmft wrote

Its called the “cocktail party effect” if anyone is curious.

Also a more broad term for how our brain perceives / uses sound is “psychoacoustics”

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stvmjv2012 t1_jdx3f78 wrote

I’ve noticed when on LSD I was able to hear like the individuals instruments in a song quite clearly. I could also hear better in general.

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Brain_Hawk t1_jdxheiv wrote

Separate sounds did not necessarily require their own attention. We can still subtly differentiate numerous different sounds simultaneously but not necessarily be attending to the different sources or channels. But they're still an element to which the complexity of that sound is being processed.

Although I guess that comes back to your first point that it depends on how you define hears, and I may just be defining it a bit different than you. Maybe you're defining it as a sandwich is specifically identified, and I'm defining it as the full total complexity of this sound information regardless of whether specific things are process. But, to be fair to that perspective, sometimes we can think back on a sound we heard recently and reevaluated, drawing attention to the memory trace of different aspects of that sound

The end point limit of a TV types sound system is one that equates to being in the environment. But now that I've said that, I realize the limit of that is in fact the neuronal limit of our processing capacity, cuz the fidelity of real life is infinite. The maximum precision of sound in the universe is whatever the plank sound constant length is, which is effectively infinitely small. Sort of. Almost

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