Heterodyne

Really? I quite doubt that. I’m pretty sure we would just hear 100Hz and 150Hz simultaneously, not 50Hz and 250Hz.

Well, there's some weird wacky interpretation stuff going on in the brain that I don't understand but it does interpret it that way so I guess it counts

@jason9, think you got it right. Yes, the human brain hears everything the ear drum sends. But humans educate the brain to only interpret what the rest of the mind thinks is vital. That is why some folks can live by a railroad and others can't.

@jason9, have you been able to use your knowledge in more real world situations?

I think mix is the word for audio frequency. Heterodyne is combining of radio frequencies.

Mixing of two frequencies, in the audio spectrum always produces the sum and difference. In this way, there is absolutely no difference between the action of a mixer in a radio and that of the mixing in your ear and brain.

Furthermore, just say that we're clear about this, very near frequencies will produce a beat note. That is the say if we have 100 Hertz and 101 Hertz we will hear a One Hz beat. As for educating your brain not to hear the sum and difference, this is physically impossible. The whole concept of trying to describe the ability of somebody to ignore living near a train track (deliberately not using the word railroad) is to do with cognitive conditioning. And yes, some people are not able to do this. I grew up near a train track, where trains went to London every 15 minutes. Therefore, I have no problem with trains or the sound of the same

@wyoelk sorry for the late response. I don’t come here very often any more.

I don’t think I’ve ever really been able to use my electronics knowledge in any real world situations. The only possibility I can think of is diagnosing what’s wrong when the house circuitry goes wonky (one time only half the house had electricity, and the lights that did work were weird and dim, turned out the generator needed to be replaced (there was a power outage at the time, thus the generator)), but even then my knowledge didn’t help much because I didn’t know how residential wiring was set up.

The only time I think my knowledge of anything beyond what the average person knows has been useful is for debugging and messing around with Linux. Beyond that, common knowledge has always been sufficient.