2024-08-26 11:00:07
Can humans perceive temperature through sound? A recent study shows that it is possible.
Researchers at the Ivcher Institute for Brain, Cognition and Technology at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) have demonstrated that humans have a little-known ability: they can detect the temperature of water simply by listening to the sound it makes when it is poured. This discovery, which comes from work on multisensory perception, reveals an unsuspected potential for better understanding the interactions between our sens.
The researchers investigated whether this perception was conscious. To do this, they exploited principles of multisensory integration, that is, the way in which the brain combines information from different senses to create a coherent perception of the environment. To test this hypothesis, they used a network pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) and a classification algorithm, the support vector machine, to analyze sound recordings of water at different temperatures. The results were surprising. The participants, without being fully aware of it, were able to distinguish the temperature of the water simply by the sound it produced. Dr. Adi Snir, postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study, explains that this ability is likely acquired over time through repeated exposure to auditory cues. The study also showed that the model ofmachine learning used by the researchers could accurately classify recorded sounds, supporting this implicit perceptual ability.
This research highlights the ability of humans to learn complex sensory correspondences from their everyday experiences. Professor Amir Amedi, founding director of theInstitut BCT, stresses the importance of these findings. He wonders whether this type oflearning could lead to the formation of new sensory maps in the brain, comparable to those we use for vision, to touch and thehearing.
This study also opens up prospects for the development of new sensory technologies. For example, by combining these methods with brain stimulation technologies, we could eventually create augmented human capacities, such as those envisaged by Elon Musk with Neuralink.
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