the most fascinating thing I heard today

[gusl]

The hair cells inside your ear move based on what you are expecting to hear, like in active noise-cancellation. People have measured this in schizophrenia patients who claim to hear voices, and this confirmed that they are indeed hallucinating voices.

Second place:
"Patience, in my definition, is attentional juice".

Comments

That is

[azzil.livejournal.com]

A totally awesome thing to know.

[tiedyedave]

That's cool!

It's also very vindicating: when I was taking 85-219 (bio foundations of behavior, i.e. the neuroscience lite class) at CMU, the anatomy of the inner ear came up one class. The prof talked about how there are efferent connections to the cilia, but no one knew what they were for. Afterwards I asked her if they might be used to focus to particular frequency ranges, just like one would focus with the eye. She said she didn't know, but it seemed plausible.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Cool! Do you know anything written up about this?