In the book “NeuroLogic: The Brain’s Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior” the author describes research into schizophrenic voices – by placing sensitive microphones near the subject’s mouth or throat, they could detect the subject mouthing the words they were “hearing” inside their brains. Which lead them to the idea that maybe these patients were lacking the feedback mechanism which allows them to recognize their own voices.
A slightly different observation/question: I can hear music in my head in real time, which is strange because sound is composed of vibrations in air. Typically when you want to replay a sound you’ve got some kind of machine which records and then plays back the sound. So do we have an audio sampler in our heads? I’m vaguely aware that when I’m “playing back” a song or sound I’ve heard, that my throat and tongue muscles feel engaged, like I’m singing, but silently.
Finally, I’ve got a mocking bird in the tree outside my window, and that little bugger is constantly sampling and playing back 0.5 second patches of sound. Car alarms, cricket noise, frogs chirping, other birds, dogs barking, cats meowing etc. How in the hell does that bird, with a tiny bird’s brain, record and then playback a substantial library of sounds?
