Most of it was a rant. The rest wasn’t really all that new but more information on the cocktail party problem. I did find the article interesting mainly because the way they moved a step closer was a focus on brain MEASUREMENTS from fMRIs where speech is localized in the brain. What that has to do with the placebo effect I have no idea.
Brain measurements means nothing without a CORRELATION with a perception if we speak about hearing...
And placebo effect is constitutive of perception, it is not only a deception like skeptic club scientism use it for a political agenda...Our brain wait with his own bias for a sound to be like he wanted it to be for specific need...Then the word "placebo" refer to complex phenomenon...
For example placebo must be eliminated ONLY for objective statistical testing by company which want to test a drug; BUT only a fool would want to eliminate placebo effects from the therapeutic....
It is the same thing for hearing evaluation by the brain.... It is called a learned bias....Like in speech recognition where the brain will correct reality or an unclear sets of soundspeech, some words spoken in some room for example, to deliver a better perception....