SHAPIRO: You've also researched the connection between music and emotion. So if, as a child, you know, you have made music and you have associated musical meaning with the ones you love and feeling safe, you're going to develop a nervous system that reflects that experience. So the hearing brain engages how we think and feel, what we know, what we remember, how we move, how we interact with our other senses. Music is really the jackpot if you think about the hearing brain. How did growing up with those kinds of features change your brain or anyone's brain, for that matter? For example, you were raised in a bilingual household. You write that in your biography, there are at least a couple of things that make your brain different from other people.

SHAPIRO: Well, let's talk about that experience. As we have, throughout our lives, made sound to meaning connections, eventually much of what we do happens automatically. That said, each one of our brain - our hearing brains is different, and it will process the information that we hear based on our life in sound. And so if we're getting garbled information, if we're getting information that has background noise, it's going to affect the signal that the brain hears in the first place. KRAUS: Well, you know, our brain does a really good job picking up what is going on in our sonic world. As my voice distorted there, what was actually happening in our brains? SHAPIRO: Well, let's talk about those two examples to start. So what exactly is going on in your brain to make sense of those sounds? Well, that's the focus of neuroscientist Nina Kraus' new book 'Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs A Meaningful Sonic World.' Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

Your brain processes this sentence in still different ways. And if we auto-tune my words, turn them into music and put a beat under them. Now, if we start to distort my voice, your brain has a harder time deciphering what I'm saying. As the sounds that I'm making right now enter your ear, your brain is effortlessly turning those air vibrations into a sentence that has meaning.

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