I posted this on another thread, on another forum. It’s not perfectly accurate but accurate enough for folks to get the gist of what is going on re hearing vs measurements:
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It’s not that we hear out to 20khz, it is the 17,500-23,500 cilia in the ear, and how they move in a complex inter related 3-D dance of motion, over time, how each responds with the firing of a neuron, over time.
Imagine that many click channels, where each motion of any kind, causes a click in each, and then each click is inter-related to the other clicks, individually and cumulatively. And then analyzed as a record, over time and decoded over time, in the minutia, by the neural components that are tied to the hearing mechanism. What I mean is that they are physically related in motion, and thus interrelated physically, in the generation of a ’click’ (neural signal firing)
So the inter-relations, easily get into the complex microsecond level flowing relations. They are all time related (firing order, and cycling) to one another in the neural analysis, in the absolute sense. There is a fluid in there, in a sac, one might say and we get traveling waves in it and in the sac surface, and the cilia are activated according to the flow patterns on what you might think of as a balloon, with the cilia inside it. So, yes, 3d flow patterns in a fluid sac, over time, with hairs throughout it, like a set of hair/fibers. Neurally connected hairs. About 20k of them. The number of ways that a signal can be created via a physical distortion impinging upon that .....is stupidly high. Crazy high. Incalculably high.
It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with sine wave signals from a signal generator, or what not. That idea is a thousand fold, a million fold joke... compared to the power and fine signal generation within and subsequent analysis capacity of the human ear.
We don’t have any hardware available to us that can come close to that level of auditory or electrical signal fine analysis.
Then we get to the question of physical ability through individual physical build. That we are all different than one another and this hearing function follows the same path as IQ differentials across a set of individuals. Some extreme ear capacities vs ..uhm..not so good hearing capacities.
we can lose the ability to hear out to 20khz, but retain the ability to hear microsecond timing differentials in complex waveforms, as that is the basic function of the ear design that is there, if there is any decent hearing function quality left at all (aged ears). Then, we’ve got TWO of them, also inter-related. The ear is an extreme machine, undoubtedly so.
Essentially, there is no delusion. None.
You hear what you hear and the hardware utilized to try and analyze that, is woefully deficient, as is the current engineering mindset involved in the measuring.
One can argue the validity and usefulness of what is heard. But that the ear is superior to the mindset of measuring, at this time? This is not even remotely debatable, for an educated (on this subject) mind.
