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The human perception of height is unique and different from macaque monkeys, our closest evolutionary parent.
To understand how the brain works, scientists have worked a lot on the study of macaque monkeys, with whom we share 93% of our DNA. Even for high level operations such as learning, memory and decision making, our brain works in a similar way.
However, when it comes to sound, scientists have discovered that humans seem to have a unique advantage in the way we perceive, how severe or high the sounds are, what is called the height.
The macaque monkey's brain is often treated as a small human brain, and many biomedical researches use it as a model of how we expect the human brain to work.
Neuroscientists such as Bevil Conway of the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, have done a lot of work comparing the brains of monkeys and humans.
"In our work, we have shown that macaque monkeys and humans have a very similar organization in the visual cortex. So they react in a similar way to color, movement, and faces, "says Conway.
But what about our response to sounds? To test this, the scientist played a series of harmonic sounds, with varying pitch, for both human volunteers and macaque monkeys, while monitoring their brain activity.
For comparison purposes, they then played a series of neutral sounds at the same frequencies. A sound without sound is like a whisper. although it has a frequency, it has no height. For these sounds, brain tests showed similar results.
However, as far as harmonic sounds are concerned, the badyzes of the human brain have shown much more activity, indicating that we have a much greater sensitivity to pitch.
So what is the height and how is it different from the frequency? Frequency is a physical measurement of the "high" or "low" quality of a sound. She separates an acute and severe violin from a serious bbad bbad.
However, pitch is a psychological phenomenon that describes how "high" or "low" something feels. That's why we can enjoy the harmonies in the music and hear the "tone" of someone's voice.
According to Conway, "When we hear a piece of music, we hear these vibrating chords, these sound melodies, and so on. What the monkey hears is only the noise component. "
These results indicate that, although macaque monkeys can be very useful in learning more about humans, we are still unique in many ways.
Pitch is a crucial part of how we communicate with each other, our emotional response to music and our experience of the world around us.
Conway suggests that this work could "indicate something very special about what the presentation does for us and what kind of meaning we are looking for". The next steps are to study the marmoset monkeys because they have a much more complicated social structure and to see if the perception of height plays a role in that.
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