Warning: I’m about to talk about brains again!
First, read this: What do we actually mean by training our ears? - #4 by WaveTheory
…because how human brains encode information is a very dynamic process that builds on what happened before. Every human brain works by taking in sensory information and tagging it with memories that it deems relevant (a process we have no control over, unfortunately) for later retrieval. If you experience an event, your brain will immediately and unconciously search for the things it has tagged as having some relevance to that event and bring those up to be quickly accessed. The set of memories/ideas/thoughts that comes up creates a frame through which we experience the new thing. For example: pizza. What happened when you read that word? You probably pictured a round, flat food with a tomato-based sauce and a variety of toppings like cheese or pepperoni or mushrooms…and maybe even recalled some smells or the name of your favorite pizza place or that time your college buddy dumped a slice all down the front of his shirt or you argued with yourself about New York vs Chicago. All of those memories are associated with that one word ‘pizza’. You may be introduced to a new type of pizza, or eat at a new pizza restaurant. And the moment you do your brain is going to bring up your pizza memories - specifically the patterns it associates with pizza - and compare and contrast the new sensory experiences, the new smells, textures, tastes, even the feeling of being in that new pizza place, with the existing ones it already has. That ‘tagging’ - connecting the new experiences to the old - is how our brains have evolved to form new memories and that’s how you’re going to remember the new experience of new pizza at a new pizza place.
Now, what happens if you introduce someone who has never eaten pizza to pizza? Their brain is going to pull up anything and everything it can to make sense of this new experience; do I taste tomato? This bread tastes like the flatbread I ate at my Aunt’s house that one time…do I tear off chunks like I did with that flatbread?…as examples.
Great. What does this have to do with audio? Well, even though every human brain works by the same mechanism on taking in stimuli and storing them, what gets stored and how it gets stored is strongly connected to our experiences and what our brain deems relevant (which again, unfortunately we have no conscious control over). No two people are going to have identical experiences, so no two people are going to connect the same incoming stimulus to the same relevant memories. This means that some music listeners, for whatever reason, are more likely to key in on bass and notice differences in bass performance. Others are going to hear vocal differences first. The list goes on and on… It’s not really about hearing differently, it’s about perceiving differently.
This is also why in general, as the Abyss video points out, the more experience you have listening, and the wider and more diverse your listening experience becomes, the easier it gets to perceive differences. When you have more points of reference to compare to, you have a better sense of what’s new. Also, the more experience we gain in ANYTHING, the more we can take in about that thing at once. The more expertise we gain, the more we can pay attention to at any one time because our brains have more relevant experiences to bring up and handle at one time.
OK, that’s enough rambling. I hope some find this useful.