骨相影响听力？脑壳如何控制我们听到的声音

来源：科研圈

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含有[论文链接]、[听力原文]、[参考译文]、[重难点词汇和短语] 的完整套餐，戳下方↓

▶ 科学60秒：每个人听到的声音到底有多不一样？ | 2:33

“骨相”控制听力？

众所周知，像波士顿交响乐厅这样的音乐厅能够利用反射混响完美地呈现出乐队的音质效果。其实，在我们耳朵深处的耳蜗——一个容纳听觉器官的小型骨腔中，也存在着一个类似的过程。

“它其实就像一个很小的声学室。所有你听到的声音都会进入耳朵，然后进到这个小小的骨腔当中。”新泽西州威廉·帕特森大学（William Paterson University）的心理学家麦克·戈登（Mike Gordon）说道。

但是在研究这一过程时，他还发现人们的听觉音方式实际上存在着诸多差异，例如基于某个人颅骨的共振特性，有些频率的声音可能听上去会比平均音量高上或低出数十分贝。

“我们对此感到震惊。我的论文初稿中堆满了感叹号，但我们最后从终稿中删除了这些感叹号。”

首先，戈登的团队对30名志愿者进行了普通的听力测试：播放不同频率、不同音量的声音。然后又进行了“骨传导”听力测试：将振动从耳后直接传递到颅骨上。

最后，他们给志愿者们播放了类似这样的白噪声……[播放的白噪声样本]……从耳后开始传递并穿过颅骨，再记录下前额传出的振动。这样一段白噪声：[播放的白噪声样本]，在经过戈登颅骨的过滤后，变成了这样……[查看全文]

Your Skull Shapes Your Hearing

Certain concert venues, like Boston’s Symphony Hall, are known to beautifully reflect the sounds of an orchestra. It turns out there’s a similar process at play in your cochlea, deep inside your ear—where a tiny bony cavity houses the organ that allows you to hear.

“It’s like its own tiny little acoustics chamber, if you will. So anything and everything you hear is going into our ear and then going into this little bony chamber.”

Mike Gordon, a psychologist at William Paterson University in New Jersey. But while studying this process, he also found there’s actually a lot of variability in the way people hear. Some frequencies can appear tens of decibels louder or quieter than average—based on the resonant properties of a person’s skull. 

“We were shocked. My first version of the draft had exclamation points all over the place, but we eventually removed those from the final copy.”

First, Gordon’s team gave 30 volunteers a hearing test—the standard type, where different frequencies of tones are played at varying loudness. Then they did a “bone conduction” hearing test, where vibrations are transmitted directly onto the skull, from behind the ear. 

Finally, they projected white noise like this ...

[CLIP: White noise sample] 

... through the skull, from behind the ear, and recorded what came out at the forehead. This is that white noise ...

[CLIP: White noise sample]

... filtered through Gordon’s skull…[full transcript]