A sound lands in your body before you've understood what it was. A creak in the night. A two-note film score. A tone of voice that tells you something is wrong before the sentence is finished.

That sequence: feel first, think second is your auditory system doing something extraordinary.

Your ears have two routes to the brain. One goes to the conscious, reasoning mind. The other goes straight to your emotional alarm system, arriving before language, before logic, before you've identified what you just heard.

In this episode, we're talking about the low road: why sound reaches your feelings before your brain catches up, and what it means that your ears are briefing your emotional system constantly, without you knowing it.