How Do We Test For Auditory Processing Disorders? The two hemispheres communicate with each other across the corpus callosum. So all the speech you hear has to be filtered through the left hemisphere to produce a response. The left hemisphere contains Wernicke’s area (where meaning is attached to the speech you hear) and Broca’s area (where your brain plans what you will say). The right hemisphere listens for patterns in pitch and timing, with cells built and organized for that purpose. When you have competing noise, the signals prefer to cross (left to right and right to left) in a process called Kimura’s Theory.Īuditory processing relies on each hemisphere to perform specific functions. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s discuss in more general terms: the left ear goes to the left hemisphere and the right ear to the right hemisphere. There are various other crossings and nuclei involved in signal enhancement as the signal moves up to the cortex. Your ears send those signals up through the brainstem to each hemisphere of the brain. At the brainstem, the two ears also communicate with one another to localize sounds. During these lower-level processes, the nerves enhance the signal a little to aid in understanding. It then converts them to a neural signal and sends that signal along the auditory nerve to the brainstem. But the important thing to know is that the ear breaks those sounds up as it hears them. I’m not going to go into the specifics of the parts of the ear and the way it does that because this article is focused on auditory processing specifically. Because sound is constantly changing, it’s also broken up by time as a function of that presentation. What Structures Are Needed For Auditory Processing?Īs I started to describe above, your ear breaks sound down based on pitch and loudness. And a breakdown in any of those skills can lead to communication problems. So as you can see, auditory processing is a complex process involving many different skills. You can think of it like playing a real-time game of Wheel Of Fortune but on the order of milliseconds instead of whole minutes. And it has to do all of that very quickly. It has to access situational and emotional context to formulate a response. And it has to attach meaning to the words and sentence. It has to recognize each syllable and put all of them back into the right order to create whole words. And since pitch and loudness change very rapidly in speech, your brain has a lot that it needs to do. Your ear actually breaks sound up into its fundamental parts – pitch and loudness – and sends those along the auditory nerve up to the brain as it perceives them. Your ear doesn’t just send whole words up to the brain and instantly understand them. Auditory processing is the way your brain makes sense of the sound that it hears.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |