Dear Kevin,I just scanned the physorg item and have no access to PRL here. Having said that I fail to see what non-linearities have to offer here, but I am convinved the real explanation is much simpler. In qauntum mechanics it is only possible to use the state once, and therefore you have to measure time after measuring frequency or vice versa. In that situation the frequency measurement changes the signal that is offered to the time measurement or the reverse. This is the situation to which the uncertaintity principle applies. For digitized sound the situation is completely different, you can offer different copies to different operators simulataneously, and therefore it is possible to measure timing and precision simultaneously. The situation is no different for the cochlea.
Kind regards, Ronald van Elburg On 2/16/2013 5:07 PM, Kevin Austin wrote:
Comments?http://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html (Phys.org)—For the first time, physicists have found that humans can discriminate a sound's frequency (related to a note's pitch) and timing (whether a note comes before or after another note) more than 10 times better than the limit imposed by the Fourier uncertainty principle. Not surprisingly, some of the subjects with the best listening precision were musicians, but even non-musicians could exceed the uncertainty limit. The results rule out the majority of auditory processing brain algorithms that have been proposed, since only a few models can match this impressive human performance. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html#jCpThanks Kevin