Do memories of sound involve actual vibrations of something?

Question

When you have a memory of sound, is there anything in your brain that vibrates at the pitch that the sound would have if you were hearing it through your ears? How about a chord: are two actual vibrations in your brain making the same reinforcements of crest and trough that sound waves do? How can you "hear" memories of sound? How do we get the sense of a musical chord?

Answer 1

One theory of how memories are stored says that the chemical interaction of neurons and the patterns they form create a kind of biological matrix. It is believed that the neurons move about forming patterns and interacting chemically with each other by using neurotransmitters and hormones. This provides a kind of biological matrix for storing information. When an external stimulus is converted into neural impulses by the body, those impulses are stored in the form of a neural pattern within the brain. If you happen to be happy or sad at the time, (the result of another neural pattern and chemical interactions) the incoming stimulus adds it's pattern to the existing one and a new pattern or memory is formed.

Do memories of sound involve actual vibrations of something? In a way they do. Think of memories as the flowing and swaying of neurons and chemicals interacting with each other within the brain as they react to impulses from the body. A memory is simply a pattern of neurons and chemicals that re-forms in reaction to a certain stimulus. Ever wonder why apple pie reminds you of a certain thing and hearing a certain song makes you remember something from your past? Feeling down? Try "activating" a different neuron pattern by doing something you did when you were feeling great.

Answer 2

When you hear something, the vibration is transmitted through all of the structures of the ear until it reaches the cochlea, where it is translated into "neural energy." The brain processes this, and that is how we determine a sound out of the vibrations in the air.

With a memory, the brain recalls the neural energy, not the vibration.

As for chords, I don't think that the human brain usually has the capacity to process more than one sound at once, which is why we hear chords as chords at all and not as two notes. Certainly, the wave form is maintained through the structures of the ear, though.

Answer 3

Part of it is probably vibration, for example, bass amplification, in loud music, is what Teenagers do, when they crank up a stereo, causing vibrations that would kill a senior citizen, but to a teenager, he may not be able to understand what the person is saying, but he can feel the music.
To a better degree, certian things will attach themselves to a person, if it invokes feeling. During the 2002 Year, a lot of Patriotic songs came out, and they all were thought invoking, depending on the artist....some made you want to, go out and buy a gun....others wanted to see the statue of liberty remade, shaking a fist.
More than anything, it's also a groove, a good beat, that will attract to a certian segment of the population. To give my example, I have a large collection of one hit wonders....maybe 20 percent of the population would agree with me, that they were great....but why a one hit wonder? Nothing else they did, came close to that one hit, wether it was from the Classical period, or from the Rock out 80s, or old school Rap....they were fun to listen to, and so, I picked them up at the music store....on 45's, no less.

Answer 4

I don't know if you can say you hear memories but I think it is safe to say that once you hear a sound it is traped inside you mind and when you hear it again your mind can relate to the sound and yes you can call that memory.
I don't know if you have ever had a dog , but if you ever noticed they react different to tones and vibrations.
For example, if you drive home your dog (some dogs that it, some dog's just don't care) may be running to the edge of your yard before you even come into veiw because it knows the sound of your car and it knows who is in it.
I know that wasn't the best example since some dogs would rather just bark at everything that moves, but I hope you see where I'm going with this.
So I would say yes vibrations are the thing that make you remember a soung because it is very hard to make a vibration from one object sound like another.

Answer 5

Vibration is merely the mechanism by which sound reaches the ears. Once the sound reaches the point at which is is transmitted via nerve impulses to the brain, it is no longer a sound, but a perception.

Perception is a function of brain activity. The "sound" you hear live s virtually no different, at that point than the memory of the sound. Same would be true of sight, smell, taste, feel, or even memories of memories.

Answer 6

No. Memory of sound is just that, a memory. A recording on a memory chip is about the same thing. The vibration ends at the cochlea in the ear where the vibrations we hear become sound.

Answer 7

Its more like the ear drum converts the vibrations taken in to a electric pulse that is sent to the brain and the brain compares that pulse with another one from memory and reconizes it as what ever it might be. so maybe not a vibration but something else sure.

Answer 8

No, when you first hear a sound, your ears take in that sound and your brain interprets the sound. When you remember a sound, your brain already has the interpretation ready to use. It has to do solely with memory. Like when you get a song stuck in your head. You can replay it over and over in your head, without the actual music, and it's because you have memorized the song.

Answer 9

Interesting

Answer 10

I know that the ears convert into a type of electric signals and pass onto the brain. The brain stores in its memory and when we want to recollect it our brain can do that. Its the same type as we store in a computer.