Pop-outs: How the brain extracts meaning from noise

(University of California - Berkeley) The brain ignores much of the sensory world surrounding us to focus on what's important, but this often means we have difficulty understanding what we see or hear. Take unintelligible speech. A well-known effect is that if a clean version of a garbled sentence is played, and then the garbled sentence replayed, the brain suddenly hears words amid the noise. UC Berkeley researchers have now measured the brain's retuning, which takes less than a second.