Weird Hearing Super Powers You Didn't Know Your Mind Has
It's underestimated how important your sense of hearing is, how much it affects your daily life in ways you don't fully appreciate. Take the inconceivable geometry you do in your head all the time, thanks to your ears. Say you're standing with your back facing a street and you hear a car approaching from the right--how do you know that? Your brain is instantly calculating the miniscule differences in volume and the slight difference in time it takes for the sound of the car to reach both ears. Yes, thank you Captain Obvious, but it's still an amazing feat that you're performing all the time, every day, with everything you hear.
You probably don't even know how much you hear every day, how unaccustomed to silence you actually are. Silence actually sounds weird, your brain knows something is wrong when it's absolutely quiet. Conversely, really loud places like cities take up so much of your subconscious mental capacities that they also create a sense of unnerving. That's why the sound of nature is so relaxing to us.
On this week's podcast Cracked editor-in-chief Jack O'Brien is joined by actor/comedian Johnny Pemberton, whose podcast 'Twisting the Wind' is an incredible aural experiment, a constantly surprising manipulation of sound that pushes the boundaries of what's expected in a podcast. They talk about the power of noise pollution, incredible Tuvan throat singing rap music, how John Williams stole everything from Russian composers and sonic devices that mess with our heads like speech jammers and The Mosquito.
Throw on your headphones and click play above, go here to subscribe on iTunes, or download it here.
Footnotes:
Twisting the Wind with Johnny Pemberton
Timmy Thomas - Why Can't We Live Together
Trailer for Glenn Gould Documentary "Genius Within"
