University University of RochesterMillisecond windows of time may be key to how we hear, a new study finds. It turns out that when you slow down a word, the auditory cortex doesn’t change the time window it is processing. Researchers know there are multiple regions in the brain that process speech—the primary auditory cortex, the secondary auditory cortex, and language areas beyond the auditory cortex. It turned out that some of the computer models learned to integrate across speech structures, unlike the auditory cortex. “Instead, we’ve shown that the auditory cortex operates on a fixed, internal timescale, independent of the sound’s structure.