Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have revealed that our brains have an ‘auto-correct’ function that makes sense of ambiguous sounds.

The work, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, claims that our brains re-evaluate sounds to modify our understanding of what we hear.

The research involved a series of experiments that asked participants to listen to isolated syllables and similar sounding words while researchers tracked brain activity, measuring the electrical currents produced by the brain, to assess how people process sound.

The primary findings revealed that the brain is sensitive to ambiguous sound just 50 milliseconds after it is heard. The brain then assesses the sound while it’s still interpreting subsequent sounds and finally, it determines how to interpret the sound. All of this takes just half a second.

“What a person thinks they hear does not always match the actual signals that reach the ear,” explained Laura Gwilliams, a researcher at the Neuroscience of Language Lab at NYUAD. “This is because the brain automatically resolves the ambiguity for us – it picks an interpretation and that’s what we perceive to hear.”