Essay 1 -The Brain That Gives Meaning to Sound
- Art of Hearing | Dyon Scheijen
- Mar 26
- 4 min read
Sound does not reach our consciousness directly from the outside world. Between the vibrations in the air and our experience of sound lies an active and constantly predictive brain (Friston, 2010). This brain filters, interprets, and prioritizes the enormous amount of sensory information that reaches us. It determines which stimuli become important and which fade into the background.
Where Art Meets Science
The Hearing Triptych
Sound · Brain · Human Experience
Essay 1
The Brain That Gives Meaning to Sound
Why the brain decides what we hear
In the science of hearing, the focus is often on the auditory system.
The ear picks up sound waves.
The cochlea converts mechanical vibrations into electrical signals (Pickles, 2012).
These signals are transmitted to the brain via the auditory nerve.
From this perspective, it seems as if hearing is primarily a matter of signal transmission: a sound originates in the external world and is transmitted to the brain.
However, modern neuroscience shows that this view is too simplistic (Friston, 2010).
The brain is not a passive receiver of sound.
It is an active system that constantly determines which signals are important and which can be ignored.
Salience: the brain chooses what is important
Within neuroscience, this process is often described by the concept of salience (Menon, 2015; Uddin, 2015).
Salience refers to the degree to which a stimulus is marked by the brain as important or relevant.
Our brains are constantly flooded with sensory information: sounds, images, touches, smells. Most of this never reaches our consciousness.
The brain filters.
It selects.
It determines what deserves attention.
This process is partly controlled by a network of brain regions often referred to as the salience network, in which the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, among others, play a central role (Menon, 2015).
This network helps the brain quickly determine which stimuli may be relevant to behavior, survival, or emotional significance.
In other words: the brain constantly decides which sound comes to the foreground and which sound fades into the background.
Why we forget a ticking clock
A simple example makes this process visible.
When someone enters a room where a clock is ticking, the sound is often noticed immediately. After a few minutes, however, the sound seems to disappear.
The clock has not stopped.
The brain has simply decided that the sound is not important.
The signal loses its salience and fades into the background of our perception.
This ability of the brain to make stimuli disappear from consciousness is essential. Without this filtering, we would be constantly overwhelmed by sensory information.
When a sound actually does not disappear
In tinnitus, this process sometimes appears to be disrupted (Jastreboff, 1990).
The sound itself can be relatively faint. Yet it remains constantly present in the consciousness of the person experiencing it.
A possible explanation is that the tinnitus signal is marked by the brain as salient—as a stimulus that deserves attention.
Once a sound acquires high salience, an amplification process occurs.
Attention to the sound increases its perception (Roberts et al., 2013).
The heightened awareness confirms that the sound seems important.
In this way, an auditory perception can gradually change into a continuous source of attention.
The brain as a predictor
In addition to filtering, another mechanism plays an important role in modern theories of perception: predictive processing (Friston, 2010).
According to this view, the brain constantly tries to predict what is happening in the outside world.
Instead of passively registering signals, the brain generates expectations and compares them with the incoming sensory information.
When a difference arises between expectation and perception, attention is generated.
Salience also plays an important role in this process.
Stimuli that are unexpected, have emotional significance, or are linked to a potential threat are given priority more quickly in our perception.
Sound is never just sound
When we try to understand tinnitus or noise nuisance, it becomes clear that the auditory signal is only one part of a much larger system.
The brain constantly determines:
which sounds stand out
which sounds acquire meaning
and which sounds fade into the background.
This shifts the question from “where does the sound come from?” to another question:
Why does this sound keep demanding attention?
The second panel of the triptych
In the triptych of hearing, the brain forms the middle panel.
Here, the physical world of sound and the human experience meet.
The brain translates vibrations into meaning.
But meaning never arises in isolation.
It is influenced by attention, emotions, expectations, and experiences.
And with that, we open the third panel of the triptych.
Not the sound.
Not only the brain.
But the person who lives with it.
In the following essay, the focus therefore shifts to that human experience.
How stress, sleep, behavior, and life context determine whether a sound remains a neutral perception or turns into a source of suffering.
It is influenced by attention, emotions, expectations, and experiences (Vlaeyen & Linton, 2000).
Where Art Meets Science
Sound · Brain · Human Experience
Literature
Friston, K. (2010). The free energy principle. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Jastreboff, P. J. (1990). Phantom auditory perception. Neuroscience Research.
Menon, V. (2015). Salience network. Annual Review of Neuroscience.
Uddin, L. Q. (2015). Salience processing and insular cortical function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Pickles, J. O. (2012). An Introduction to the Physiology of Hearing.
Roberts, L.E. et al. (2013). Neural mechanisms of tinnitus.
Vlaeyen, JWS, & Linton, SJ (2000). Fear-avoidance and its consequences in chronic pain.
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