Originally posted by JeffHamm
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Do you actually believe this?
There have been actual studies conducted towards determining what is going on in the synaptic transmission of signals that make us typically ignore our own footsteps and mark that of another; it is not fully understood, but the basic reasoning is that your very own footsteps activate the same neural network over and over again and its a sound that the brain already recognizes, so an inhibitory response soon develops for that region of neurons. Another person's footsteps are suddenly activating an entirely different neural network, so in that crucial sense they are very different. It is not a matter that both disparate sounds are in competition with the brain's processing unit for attention, the brain ignores or suppresses the first, and towards the new sound it takes an active interest. The neurological terms for this is called habituation and deviance detection....both active fields of study. By now Athelwulf must be rubbing his eyes and banging his head against a desk.
Here is one study on mice conducted at Duke University in which the sounds a mouse associates with its own footsteps is suppressed through auditory cortical inhibitory neurons.
Here is a study on how new auditory sounds (like Paul's footsteps) activates a stronger neural response:
Deviance Detection and Encoding Acoustic Regularity in the Auditory Midbrain
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view...190849061-e-19
from an excerpt:
"Midbrain neurons are capable of responding more rapidly and strongly when a new stimulus is not matching to a previously encoded regularity; a phenomenon referred to as deviance detection."
So we need to be very clear as to which types of sounds are masking agents, and which types are not: random sounds or white noise, stimulating intermittently various neural networks are masking agents; repetitive stimuli like one's own footsteps are not competing with anything, they give no new information and the brain is not processing them. It would make no sense if the brain was that inefficient.
If we were to consider again your example of looking into a monitor for an unanticipated radar signal, one would think that this was an assignment where the individuals stared into a monitor hour after hour, day after day until fatigue set in; and one imagines the sudden radar blip on the screen was over immediately....it not being repeated over a course of a minute or so, unlike the gait of Paul trodding behind Lechmere. This is more a case of fatigue then anything else, something i doubt afflicted Lechmere or Paul that morning. Personally, i do not think it is a good analogy.
As for Lechmere only noticing Paul once he stopped, that was not the case. Lechmere describes that he was moving forward towards the body, and then stopped when he heard Paul's footsteps. " It looked like a tarpaulin sheet, but walking to the middle of the road he saw that it was the figure of a woman.
At the same time, he heard a man about forty yards away coming up Buck's Row in the direction that the witness had come from."
As for walking down Buck's row at 3:38 am being a boring jaunt, Paul would disagree with you: "Few people like to come up and down here without being on their guard, for there are such terrible gangs about. There have been many knocked down and robbed at that spot."
It was a dangerous area.....why deny it?
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