Why Morse Code is Actually a Really Weird Way to Communicate:

The following is excerpted from Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time by Dean Buonomano. We have seen that humans and other animals engage in a wide range of temporal tasks, timing the delays it takes sound to arrive from one ear to another, the duration of red lights, or the rotation of the Earth around its axis. These tasks rely on the timing of isolated intervals or durations; the temporal equivalent of judging the length of an object. In contrast, speech and music recognition require determining the temporal structure of complex temporal patterns: of putting together many temporal pieces to make out the whole. Time is to speech and music recognition as space is to visual object recognition. We can think of recognizing a face in a drawing as a spatial problem -- that is, the relevant information is contained in the spatial relationships between all the elements of the drawing. It is also a hierarchical problem: low-level information (lines and curves) must be integrated into a unified image. A circle is a circle, but two side-by-side pairs of concentric circles become eyes; place those in a larger circle and you have a face, and so forth until we have a crowd of people within a scene. Speech and music are the temporal equivalent of recognizing a visual scene: they require solving a hierarchy of embedded temporal problems. Speech requires tracking the temporal features of progressively longer elements: phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. In some ways recognizing a hierarchy of temporal patterns is more challenging, because it requires some sort of memory of the past. All the features of a drawing are simultaneously present on a static piece of paper, but the relevant features of speech or music require integration across time; that is, each feature must be interpreted in the context of elements that have already faded into the past. Morse code provides perhaps the best example of just how sophisticated the brain's ability to process temporal patterns is. Speech and music rely on information encoded in the temporal structure of sounds, but there is also a vast amount of information conveyed in the pitch of sounds. We can think of pitch as spatial information, a bit like the orientation of a line on a piece of paper. This can be a bit confusing because pitch refers to the perception of the frequency of sounds, and frequency is an inherently temporal property measured in cycles per second -- that is, the interval between the repetition of cycles of sound-wave vibrations. The frequency of sounds, however, are represented spatially by the auditory sensory cells (hair cells) along the length of the cochlea. So as far as the central nervous system is concerned, discriminating the pitch of sounds is essentially a spatial task -- akin to the differences in the location of the keys on a piano. Morse code is independent of pitch or spatial information of any sort -- in Morse code timing is everything.

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