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8 S U M M E R 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Did you hear that? b y G . J o h n G a r r e t t C A S I 've bitten off something relatively big to report on, and it will take a few installments to get through it, but Auditory Neuroscience (Jan Schnupp, Israel Nelken, and Andrew King, MIT Press paperback edition, 2012) is, beyond its pure density, an interesting and informative text that I can recommend. There is math, if you want it, but the authors encourage the reader to fake it through the formulae, as the subsequent explanations work with- out most of the algebra. The book begins with a couple of fascinating exam- ples about how we hear, and they have kept me piling through the dense stuff to get to a better understand- ing of the process. I'm sure it will inform our work as sound professionals, and there are hints that this book will turn our understanding of how we perceive and process sound upside down. For instance: "You have probably never thought about it this way, but every time you talk to some- one, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as a telepathic activity, as you are effectively 'beaming your thoughts into the other person's head,' using as your medium, a form of 'invisible vibrations.'" Unschooled in neuroscience, I have long maintained that understanding speech is a form of decryption. I have also written about how I believe that, when you hear bad sound in a film, it excites a part of your brain to tell you that your primal threat-detection system is not working correctly, and you can't go back to experiencing the movie until you fix the (perceived) problem in the per- sonal alarm system. The ability of our ears and brain to figure out what something is just from the sound of it is truly astonishing. An early example is to imagine a drawer full of cutlery crashing onto the kitchen floor. It's a tremendously complex sound made up of nearly endless sine wave combinations that radiate from the source and reflect off surfaces until they get to our ear. However, we can make a good approximation of the size, mass, and materials making the noise almost instantly. Exploring the book: Auditory Neuroscience: Making Sense of Sound