Dr. Jennifer Groh on Huberman Lab: How Gaze Reshapes Hearing

Groh proposes that thinking is the brain running internal simulations in the same sensory and motor circuits used for perception and action. For example, thinking “cat” likely triggers visual cortex activity (appearance), auditory cortex (meow, purr), and even smell or tactile representations. This explains why we can instantly specify a cat’s color or smell when asked, and why competing sensory tasks (like conversation) can impair visually demanding behavior (like merging in heavy traffic). Practically, recognizing thought as simulation suggests that controlling sensory input—what you see, hear, and feel—is a direct lever on what and how you think.

Classically, audio processing was thought to flow bottom-up from the ear. Groh’s work shows that eye position information is injected very early into the auditory system: auditory neurons in the superior colliculus change responses depending on where the eyes are pointed, and even the eardrum moves in a precise pattern with each saccade. When you move your eyes left or right, top-down signals from the brain drive tiny, anti-phase eardrum motions in the two ears, encoding eye movement amplitude and direction. This suggests that spatial alignment of sight and sound begins at or near the periphery, not just in “high” brain centers.

To locate sound in space, the brain exploits tiny differences in arrival time and loudness between the two ears—up to only about 0.5 milliseconds for sounds from the left vs. right. This is shorter than a single neural spike, so specialized pathways with highly precise synapses and population coding are required. Outer ear folds also filter frequencies differently depending on sound direction, creating an individual ‘acoustic fingerprint’ you learn over development (and must relearn as your head grows, or if your ear anatomy changes). This has implications for hearing loss in one ear, for the design of 3D audio, and for understanding why some spatial audio tricks (like ventriloquism) work so well.

The brain routinely overrides raw ear input to create coherent sound sources. In movies, dialogue and explosions seem to come from shifting locations on the screen, even though the physical sound may come from fixed speakers or earbuds. In ventriloquism, visual cues about a puppet’s moving mouth can reassign the perceived sound source away from the actual speaker. The brain uses ‘most likely source’ rules that weigh visual information heavily, and constantly resolves multiple delayed echoes into a single auditory event. Understanding this construction process highlights why acoustic environments (rooms, materials, ceilings) matter for clarity and comfort, and why audio illusions are so convincing.

Music appears in every culture, but its evolutionary function is less obvious than language. Groh highlights a theory that rhythm and group sound-making (stomping, chanting, singing together) evolved to synchronize group behavior and amplify collective presence—for example, to scare off predators or competitors around a carcass. Rhythmic coordination feels good, reinforcing cooperation. This framing helps explain military bands, war chants, pre-game haka rituals, and the social bonding power of concerts. It also reframes music as a powerful tool for state control—energizing vigor, signaling unity, or regulating mood—rather than mere entertainment.