The easiest way to talk to someone else is face-to-face. If you can see the movements of a person's lips and facial muscles, you can more easily work out what they're saying, a fact made obvious if you're trying to have a conversation in a noisy environment. These visual cues clue our brains in on how best to interpret the signals coming from our ears.
But what happens when that's not possible, like when you're chatting on the phone or listening to a recorded message? New research suggests that if you've spoken to someone before, your brain uses memories of their face to help decode what they're saying when they're not in front of you. Based on previous experience, It runs a simulation of the speaker's face to fill in any information missing from the sound stream alone.
These results contradict a classical theory about hearing - the "auditory-only model" ...
