Hi, this is just what I read and thought about it. Would I be happy about comments Link Phonagnosie”Hello, here speaks your daughter” Scientists hope to find phonagnostics via internet portal [ www.wissenschaft-online.de/article/1171419 ] The inability to recognize voices is hardly researched, but relatively widespread. Through an online test, researchers hope to finally find enough “determine pigeon” subjects. The 60-year-old Englishwoman KH is successful management The only thing she has to avoid is telephone conferences. Even if she is on the phone with close relatives, she has no idea who is at the other end of the line. They have already set themselves up for it and report with “Hello, here speaks your daughter” or “Here speaks your husband”. But a telephone conference with several businessmen would put her before an insoluble task: The Englishwoman KH is the only sure person in the world. This disorder, named after the Greek word for “voice” (phonema) and -agnosis, is the “non-recognition”, researches Katharina von Kriegstein from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences in Leipzig. “To recognize voices is, in a sense, a question of talent: some people can do it very well, others can’t do it at all. Then we talk about a selective deficit,” says the doctor. Medical practitioner. Together with two employees, she has decided to investigate the phenomenon in Germany. A difficult thing, because the researcher lacks the research objects: subjects whose brain activity she could investigate in the magnetic resonance imaging. Only KH has been diagnosed so far, more precisely, she diagnosed herself. The Englishwoman drew parallels to her own deficit after reading an article about prosopagnostics. “KH said: ‘I can see faces wonderfully, only with the voices I have problems.’ She then contacted scientists from University College London,” says Kriegstein. There, suitable tests had to be developed, because after all, no similar case of congenital phonagnosia was known except KH. Only Sean Connery recognized By 96 votes, KH only recognized the one from Sean Connery. But why with the Sti They and the researchers don’t know how to detect mm does not work. Standard investigations showed that there are no known neurological diseases in her, she has no brain damage and can hear normal. She can also recognize emotions such as anger, anger and sadness by the voice, as well as the gender of the speaker. Only those who speak do not know that. Such a case is not known in Germany. “Based on healthy subjects, we have a certain idea of this. “If test subjects are to recognize voices during investigations with the functional magnetic resonance imaging, three brain regions are usually active, which take over the task of voice recognition and processing. “But above all a region in the right temporal lobe really appeals to voice identification,” says the Leipzig researcher. It could well be that phonagnostics have their deficits here. But still fish “Perhaps certain cells don’t work properly or the region is not properly developed. It may also be used for something else, but these are all speculations.” Vulnerability in the overall system It would be different if the brains of twenty phonagnostic and as many non-phonagnostic individuals were compared. The information obtained could not only reveal the causes of phonagnosia. They could be something like It is often difficult to isolate individual performances from the overall system of speech perception and assign brain areas. With a phonagnostic, this would be possible: the missing puzzle stone, the crucial gap in the system, could be an entry gate for the detection of brain mechanisms. Until 2009 it was thought that only stroke patients or people with brain lesions would be able to use this neurological probe. With the case of KH, the “voice aubism” was given a new dimension. 2.5 percent of the population could be phonagnostic from birth, experts estimate. But this is also only a conjecture. Most phonagnostics did not even know about their problem themselves, says von Kriegstein. They would unconsciously compensate for this deficit through behavioral strategies. KH, for example, only accepted registered telephone calls in her profession. The Leipzig researcher explains that this is often like an enlightenment. www.phonagnosie.de The scientists now hope for the same effect in the case of congenital phonagnosia. The most important instrument is an online test on www.phonagnosie.de, which everyone can do independently on the computer. Two prospective linguists of the MPI research group, Florian Hintz and Claudia Roswandowitz, worked on and designed it. r on the test developed for KH in England. For 20 minutes, three female and male voices each speak short sentences such as “the baker paints the grain” or “the writer presents a book”. “In the final test phase of the male block, the participants then only get two-word sentences like ‘he cries, he rhymes, he builds, he combs’ to hear,” explains Hintz. At his own test run he succeeded in 28 out of 30 male voices and only 15 out of 30 female voices. In addition, his colleague Claudia Roswandowitz adds that calm and concentration are absolutely important. She, too, would not create the test one hundred percent, but the high level of difficulty is intended: “This is how the selection is more accurate. If everyone can create the test, it could also be easier for phonagnostics. We do not know what mechanisms and tricks they have taught themselves over the course of their lives.” If you don’t think about it at the same time, it could be bad headphones or a restless environment. However, if you do a very bad job, you will receive a questionnaire by e-mail. If the signs still indicate phonagnosia, you will be invited to the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. Further questionnaires and tests are waiting for him. The subject must recognize faces, assign familiar voices to the right people – all that the Englishwoman KH before two In the end, the ultimate discipline of neuroscientists is in the individual case: the examination in the brain scanner. The test is shown to be of great interest. 170 Internet users already made it after three weeks. Four of them could be “interesting”, says Katharina von Kriegstein. Two have already returned the questionnaire and confirmed the scientists’ assumption that they could be phonagnostics. agnostic KH could soon get company. Annegret Faber The author is a freelance journalist in Leipzig © spectrumdirekt