Hallucinating Speech: The Architecture of Phonemic Restoration

If you are listening to someone speak on a noisy train and a loud cough obscures the middle of a word, your brain does not register a gap in the audio. Instead, your auditory cortex instantly and flawlessly hallucinates the missing consonant so you hear the word perfectly. This is the Phonemic Restoration Effect. The human brain relies heavily on top-down processing. Because our minds possess a ...