How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife
How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife
F0, listening effort and the vitality of human hearing
(Consciousness in First Person • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • The Feeling and Knowing of Taá)
The Feeling and Knowing of Taá — listening in midlife
I close my eyes and notice something simple:
a voice speaking, a melody rising, someone calling my name in the next room.
When I was younger, I just heard.
Now, in midlife, I notice the effort:
I lean my head a little more.
I squint my eyes as if that could help the ears.
In noisy places, I feel a tension in my shoulders just to follow the conversation.
Taá — this first-person feeling-knowing — tells me that my hearing did not “suddenly break”.
It is changing slowly, metabolic layer by metabolic layer, as my brain continues to encode pitch, rhythm and timbre with a little more work than before.
And that is exactly the world explored by Jordan McHaney, Zhu Guo, G. Nike Gnanateja, Ananthanarayan Parthasarathy and Bharath Chandrasekaran, in a 2025 article in the European Journal of Neuroscience:
“Neural encoding of fundamental frequency and processing of discrete tone accents in midlife.”
(search terms: McHaney Guo Gnanateja Parthasarathy Chandrasekaran 2025 “neural encoding of fundamental frequency” “discrete tone accents” “midlife” “European Journal of Neuroscience” EEG FFR)
They ask, com muita precisão científica:
How does my brain encode voice F0 and tone accents when I reach midlife — and how much extra effort does that cost?
What scientific question are they really asking?
Fundamental frequency (F0) is the acoustic basis of:
pitch of the voice,
tone accents in tonal languages,
intonation in questions vs. statements,
emotional color in speech.
The question is not “can midlife adults still hear?”.
The question is more subtle and more interesting:
Is the neural encoding of F0 and discrete tone accents in midlife still as sharp, synchronized and energy-efficient as in young adults, even when audiograms look “normal”?
This is where hidden hearing effort lives — in the quality of neural phase-locking, not only in decibels.
Methods: how they listened to the listening brain
The authors used EEG to measure how the brain follows the pitch of sounds in real time.
Two main layers of analysis are central here:
1. Frequency-following response (FFR) to F0
They presented speech-like sounds or tone accents with clear F0 contours.
Recorded scalp EEG over auditory regions.
Extracted the FFR, where neural activity literally “tracks” the periodicity of F0.
Used frequency-domain analysis (FFT) to quantify energy at F0 and its harmonics.
Assessed phase-locking — how precisely the neurons synchronize to the sound’s rhythm.
2. Tone accent processing and cortical responses
Beyond the brainstem FFR, they looked at cortical potentials related to discrete tone accents.
Compared response patterns between younger and midlife adults.
Used multichannel analyses (e.g. PCA-like decompositions) to understand global patterns of activation.
Even when the article does not explicitly use every tool, this kind of EEG pipeline naturally relates to:
ICA to remove eye blinks and muscle artifacts,
FFT to study spectral coding of F0 and harmonics,
eventually CSD / LORETA families of techniques when the field wants to move from scalp to source-level interpretation.
Here the core is clear:
EEG + FFR + spectral analysis to see how midlife brains encode F0 and tone accents under realistic listening demands.
Main findings: hearing is still there, but vitality changes
Summarizing the core results in Taá language:
In midlife, neural encoding of F0 tends to be weaker and less precisely phase-locked than in younger adults, even when hearing is clinically “normal”.
Processing of discrete tone accents becomes less sharp, especially under challenging conditions.
Behavioral performance can often be maintained — people still get the right answer —
but with more effort, more neural energy, more tension.
In other words:
The sound still arrives;
the voice is still understood;
but the brain is paying a higher energetic price.
This is exactly what many people in midlife describe:
“I hear you… but I get tired.”
Reading the study through our concepts
Mente Damasiana and the metabolic cost of listening
In a Damasian Mind perspective, listening is not just an acoustic process;
it is an interoceptive–proprioceptive act:
The body adjusts posture,
breathing changes,
neck and facial muscles recruit,
attention networks tighten.
Reduced F0 encoding in midlife is not a “defect”;
it is a metabolic reconfiguration of the system.
The body is reorganizing how it supports the act of listening.
Eus Tensionais and listening effort
Each Eu Tensional is a pattern of tension and focus that we adopt for certain tasks.
There is a “listening Eu” for noisy restaurants,
another for intimate conversation,
another for following tonal contrasts in a second language.
The paper shows that in midlife, these Eus Tensionais for listening need to pull more energy to keep performance.
Neural encoding becomes a little less effortless and a little more “tensional”.
Quorum Sensing Humano (QSH) and social listening
Listening is never isolated.
In human QSH, the voices of others are part of how we regulate ourselves.
If F0 encoding becomes less precise,
my ability to read tone of voice, irony, emotion may subtly shift,
especially in complex social situations.
The study is not only about acoustics;
it is about how the social body of midlife reorganizes its listening in everyday quorum.
Zona 1 / Zona 2 / Zona 3
In Zona 1, listening is automatic: I decode tone and F0 without thinking about it.
In Zona 2, I can enjoy sound — music, conversation, voice — with fruição, with creative attention.
When encoding becomes fragile, there is a risk of sliding into a Zona 3 of defensive listening:
withdrawal from social situations,
irritation with noise,
the feeling of “I don’t belong to this soundscape anymore”.
The article gives early, physiological warning signs of this transition — a crucial point for mental health, not just audiology.
DANA and the intelligence of aging hearing
From a DANA viewpoint (DNA as living intelligence):
Aging hearing is not simply loss — it is reconfiguration.
The neural system keeps negotiating:
which frequencies are more important,
which temporal cues are still robust,
how to compensate with cognitive prediction, context, language experience.
The McHaney et al. study shows DANA in action:
the auditory system trying to preserve meaning even when the physical encoding of F0 declines.
The Feeling and Knowing of Taá — opening a small decolonial window
Here I also notice another layer.
Most of the classic work on F0, tone accents and hearing effort comes from WEIRD contexts
(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)
and often from English-centric listening environments.
But pitch and tone are not neutral:
In tonal and Indigenous languages,
in Latin American songs, prayers and oral traditions,
F0 is a carrier of identity, spirituality and politics.
When I feel my own midlife listening effort, I also feel how colonial science tends to treat aging hearing only as a technical failure —
and not as a transformation of my place in the sound-quorum of the world.
When Taá manifests, I perceive that there is no real separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).
Who gets heard — and whose tone is ignored — is always a political and spiritual question, not only a physiological one.
Every time a study like this is read with courage, it opens a small crack in Zona 3,
inviting us to see aging not as deficit, but as a chance to redesign how we listen to each other.
Avatares Referências
For this study, a very natural reference is the Math/Hep avatar —
the one that sees:
fine-grained temporal coding,
phase-locking,
energy distribution across frequencies,
and relates all that to behavioral performance and effort.
Alongside Math/Hep, I also feel the presence of the Brainlly avatar,
curious about how training, musical experience, bilingualism and sound-rich cultures might reshape these F0 encodings in midlife, especially in Latin America.
Implications for education, health and policy in LATAM
Hearing health as cognitive and social policy
Midlife auditory evaluations in Latin America should include measures related to F0 encoding, not only threshold audiometry.
This is essential for teachers, community leaders, health workers — people whose work depends on listening to many voices every day.
Lifelong music and voice use as protection
Choirs, traditional singing, liturgy, popular music and Indigenous chant can be framed as neuroprotective practices for pitch encoding.
Decolonial audiology
We need research on F0 encoding in Indigenous and mestizo languages, not just in English or major tonal languages from the Global North.
Workplace policies
For midlife workers, reducing chronic noise exposure and offering “listening-friendly” environments is not a luxury — it is neuro-ecology.
Search keywords
McHaney Guo Gnanateja Parthasarathy Chandrasekaran 2025
“neural encoding of fundamental frequency” “discrete tone accents” “midlife”
“European Journal of Neuroscience” EEG FFR listening effort aging hearing
