Well, there are only so many hairs in the inner ear to transmit sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell

"The human cochlea contains on the order of 3,500 inner hair cells and 12,000 outer hair cells at birth" Since those hairs are necessary to transmit sound to the nerve cells - that does create a limit to number of audio imputs that can be transmitted to the brain.

I didn't find anything to clarify how many hairs must react to register a sound at all ( hairs to decibel for example). But given that the number of hairs is much higher than the maximum number of decibels the ear can process . . . So there is a limit on the number of audio inputs that can reach the neurons.

Then,from there, how much of that data can the brain process? It gets complicated, because not only does the brain recognize pitch, it process elements like rhythm and volume. Our brains are limited, so short answer is yes, there is a limit to how much of any kind of input the brain can process.

I didn't find anything that gave a number for audio input. But, I did find this very detailed explanation of how neurons connect to the hairs that transmit sound.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078955/

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"This doesn't necessarily relate to how many different sounds you hear, "

Thanks for noticing that your reply doesn't address the question.

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Without the advent of fire for cooking and the nutritional liberation it provided (especially for meat), we simply wouldn’t be here, speaking and typing in complicated human language on screens programmed with different complicated languages. Frontal lobe development in our early human ancestors matches up nicely with evidence of our beginning to wield flame for cooking.

Cooking increases the nutrient concentration of food by dehydration, or rehydration with the broth and liquids of other foods as they cook. It breaks down proteins in ways chewing and acidic stomachs couldn’t as efficiently, allowing our GI tracts to shorten over time as we gave them less hard work to do. Vegetable fibers are either solubilized or broken down into smaller more manageable molecular pieces, many of which are the very favorite food of any healthy gut flora. Some raw (and common!) foods are toxic in the raw state, yet perfectly edible when cooked. It offers sterilization of food, too, which is a massive survival advantage.

There are, of course, some heat sensitive nutrients which are impacted by cooking, which shouldn’t discourage us from cooking; rather, we should simply enjoy some foods raw and some cooked!

On dogs: about 750,000 thousand years separate the advent of human cooking and the domestication of dogs. Dogs have spent, evolutionarily speaking, much less time with altered diets including cooked food, so they capacity to handle food in its raw state remains greater than ours. Their bodies are more recently equipped to handle raw food, and haven’t for as long had selective pressures to adjust to/benefit from/change in response to cooking.

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Interesting, yeah. I bet that'd be an interesting thing to find out about even, maybe eventually brain scan technology will be cheap and powerful enough that you could look into it for a lark:).

That book mentioned that approximately 50% of the brain (or 50% of the cortex at least?) Is dedicated to vision, and there's evidence I guess for tissue that'd normally take on one function to end up doing something else if the normal input feed's down for some reason. With only half the visual input coming in when you were that young, seems like that's a lot of computational hardware that's freed up for something else. Maybe you've got some only vaguely noticed superpower you'd be surprised other people don't have, who knows?

Edit: one last thing you might find interesting. Elsewhere in this thread actually, there was a discussion about biological inspiration behind convolutional neural networks from the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The inspiration was from Hubel and Wiesel, two really foundational Neuroscience researchers in the late 1950's and 1960's. They won the Nobel prize for their work, one critical experiment of which involved keeping one eye of a kitten closed and seeing how it changed their development. I don't know the details of their findings, but given the historical significance of that research, I bet your case actually has a lot of understanding behind it. Just wondering out loud more than sharing anything specific, but interesting that Hubel and Wiesel more or less came up in two comment threads here.

Oh wow. Thanks for that.

The cut is definitely before the optic Chiasm. In fact, it's not far behind the eyeball so yeah, I'm a No.1

The accident happened when I was around six months old, so definitely still in the developmental stage. Now I'm wondering how my optics are wired 🤣

That reminds me of one of the diagrams from the book I got this from, I took a screenshot and posted it if you're curious.

And yeah, if the severed nerve is between your right eye and the optic chiasm, then it seems that is what happens. Half your left eye's view gets sent to one hemisphere, the other gets sent to the other, and then they get stitched together again upstream. Though I suppose if it happened when you were young enough, it could be a fair bit different... injuries when you're still in the 'critical period' can rewire in really unusual ways.

That diagram shows what's lost from severed optic tract at different points through the pipeline, thought you might think it was interesting. For every one of those, there's probably a bunch of people living that life. Sounds like you're number '1'. I think I'd actually prefer that to '2' or '3'.

Anyway, cheers... glad I could share something you found interesting. I've got ADHD, so I've got my own version of neuroscience adding to my understanding of myself, haha.

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That's not believed--OneShotHelpful is wrong. Read their Wikipedia link carefully--there's no support for the claim. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithischia

>Ornithischia (/ˌɔːrnəˈθɪski.ə/) is an extinct order of mainly herbivorous dinosaurs characterized by a pelvic structure superficially similar to that of birds.

The key word here being "superficially".

>However, birds are only distantly related to this group as birds are theropod dinosaurs.[3] Ornithischians with well known anatomical adaptations include the ceratopsians or "horn-faced" dinosaurs (e.g. Triceratops), the pachycephalosaurs or "thick-headed" dinosaurs, the armored dinosaurs (Thyreophora) such as stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, and the ornithopods.

Only the last of those was bipedal. And of course all of these bipeds had quadrupedal ancestors--we're all tetrapods.

Australia is a fairly big place. It's either the world's largest island or the smallest continent depending on how you define it.

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Separate sounds did not necessarily require their own attention. We can still subtly differentiate numerous different sounds simultaneously but not necessarily be attending to the different sources or channels. But they're still an element to which the complexity of that sound is being processed.

Although I guess that comes back to your first point that it depends on how you define hears, and I may just be defining it a bit different than you. Maybe you're defining it as a sandwich is specifically identified, and I'm defining it as the full total complexity of this sound information regardless of whether specific things are process. But, to be fair to that perspective, sometimes we can think back on a sound we heard recently and reevaluated, drawing attention to the memory trace of different aspects of that sound

The end point limit of a TV types sound system is one that equates to being in the environment. But now that I've said that, I realize the limit of that is in fact the neuronal limit of our processing capacity, cuz the fidelity of real life is infinite. The maximum precision of sound in the universe is whatever the plank sound constant length is, which is effectively infinitely small. Sort of. Almost

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That seems logical. +1.

One clue might be that of course seeing as your sensory neurons are not going to be completely saturated or suppressed in temporary parasthesia -- and certainly not all of them in an area will be -- and the same goes for any motor neurons that you might snag in a similar manner. The difference is that the translation from motor neuron stimulation to motor movement involves integrating a lot more components that might mitigate the effect that pinching a couple disparate nerve endings would have.

Taking from Knudson's Biomechanics (ch. 4 pp. 95--96):

>If the muscle fibers of a motor unit twitch in unison, how does a whole muscle generate a smooth increase in tension? The precise regulation of muscle tension results from two processes: recruitment of different motor units and their firing rate.

>Recruitment is the activation of different motor units within a muscle. ... Firing rate or rate coding is the repeated stimulation of a particular motor unit over time. ...

>When muscle is artificially stimulated for research or training purposes to elicit maximal force, the frequency used is usually higher than 60 Hz to make sure that motor unit twitches fuse into a tetanus. A tetanus is the summation of individual twitches into a smooth increase in muscle tension.

>... at the whole muscle level[,] muscles are activated to in complex synergies to achieve movement or stabilization tasks. Muscles are activated in short bursts that coordinate with other forces (external and segmental interactions) to create human movement.

And there's a bunch of more details to recruitment and firing rate, and it goes on in complexity and unknowns pursuant to further research. One relevant point is that in many cases you use only one firing per motor neuron, over several different neurons, to create a long smooth complex movement (the example they use is bicycling). Since it's an integrating effect, a single missing signal may not actually cause much of a problem -- but I don't know. Anyway, it's a clue.

Can I get a source on this information?

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