Why You Can't Guess The Secret Sound

It's the second most frustrating part of the Rock 95 Secret Sound contest: Figuring out what that random collection of noises could be.

(The most frustrating part, of course, is trying to be caller 9 when you think you've figured it out.)

You can bang your head against the wall trying to come up with a good guess. You can scream at your radio when you hear what you think are foolish guesses. You can throw your radio once you hear a correct answer and know you'd never have thought of that.

But there's real neuroscience behind why it's such a struggle.

Noggin Science!

"Hearing" isn’t just about the ears picking up vibrations in the air, it's a whole brain process. Scientists describe this as “auditory perception,” and it’s a highly complex set of neural computations that take place from the cochlea in the inner ear all the way up to higher-level auditory pathways in the brain. Clear as mud right?

Here’s the catch: your brain is actually terrified of ambiguity. We’re wired to find patterns, to match what we hear with previous experience, and to fill in missing pieces based on context. That's why you can pick up on a friend's voice in a noisy bar or immediately recognize the beat of a favourite song. Scientists have proven that your brain can retune itself in a fraction of a second, if it knows what it's listening for.

But when we don’t have that context, like hearing a random sound for the first time in our Secret Sound contest, we only get the raw vibration.

Our brains have to guess the sound source with no visual cues, no semantic hints, and often very little repetition. That makes every guess come from a brain that's handicapped.

Ears vs. Brain

Your ears may be perfectly good at detecting subtle differences between sounds, but your brain doesn’t always use that information consciously.

A recent study showed that people can unconsciously distinguish sounds far better than they can explicitly recognize them when they’re listening directly, like when you’re just trying to hear what that Secret Sound is.

Maybe the trick is to put the Secret Sound on repeat while you sleep? Maybe you just need to listen to it in the background while working out? Doing chores? Making love?

Just know that the next time you swear the sound is a motorcycle, but it turns out to be a paper cutter, it's not you. It's your brain. And it's science.