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This is Scientific Americans’ 60-Second Science, I’m Cynthia Graber, this will just take a minute.

Our ears are highly attuned¹ to sounds in the world around us. It’s not just the frequency of the sound itself. There are also subtle differences and shifts in loudness and pitch. That’s what tells us, for instance, whether that baby crying belongs to us and just where it’s located. But according to a recent study, what you and I hear may not sound the same. Scientists at the University of Oxford² are trying to understand how the ears and the brain work together. They fit ferrets with auditory implants³, train them to respond to sound and then look at the way their neurons reacted. It turns out that each ferret's neurons in the auditory cortex responded to changes in gradual differences in sound. But each ferret responded differently. The researchers say this is applicable to humans. They say this means that our brains are wired to process sounds depending on how our ears deliver that sound. So if you suddenly heard the word through my ears, it might sound quite different. The scientists say this research could help in a quest to design better hearing aids and speech recognition systems.

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific Americans’ 60-Second Science, I’m Cynthia Graber.