Auditory information loss in real-world listening environments

TL;DR

This paper reviews how the mammalian auditory system progressively loses information from real-world sounds to simplify complex signals, highlighting a unifying principle of sensory processing across modalities.

Contribution

It introduces the concept that information loss in hearing is a fundamental, unifying principle for understanding sensory processing in mammals, especially humans.

Findings

Auditory system gradually eliminates information to decomplexify signals.

Information loss is a key mechanism for real-time processing of complex sounds.

This principle may extend to other sensory modalities.

Abstract

Whether animal or speech communication, environmental sounds, or music -- all sounds carry some information. Sound sources are embedded in acoustic environments that contain any number of additional sources that emit sounds that reach the listener's ears concurrently. It is up to the listener to decode the acoustic informational mix, determine which sources are of interest, decide whether extra resources should be allocated to extracting more information from them, or act upon them. While decision making is a high-level process that is accomplished by the listener's cognition, selection and elimination of acoustic information is manifest along the entire auditory system, from periphery to cortex. This review examines latent informational paradigms in hearing research and demonstrates how several hearing mechanisms conspire to gradually eliminate information from the auditory sensory channel. It is motivated through the computational need of the brain to decomplexify unpredictable real-world signals in real time. Decomplexification through information loss is suggested to constitute a unifying principle of the mammalian hearing system, which is specifically demonstrated in human hearing. This perspective can be readily generalised to other sensory modalities.