For this week’s Please Explain, we’ll find out how we process all the sounds we hear every day—from the hum of the heater to the wail of sirens to music to speech—and how it shapes our brains and behavior. Seth Horowitz, neuroscientist and assistant research scientists at Brown, explains how we hear, why songs get stuck in our heads, why certain sounds make us cringe while others are soothing, the ways we’ve learned to manipulate sound, and the difference between hearing and listening. He’s the author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind.