Latest Primary auditory cortex Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online There are noises that set our teeth on edge, make us recoil, and generally unnerve us. For me, that noise is the sound of someone popping his or her back. Scientists from Newcastle University and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging say heightened activity between the emotional and auditory areas of the brain can explain why the sound of chalk on a blackboard, a knife on a bottle, or a joint popping is so unpleasant. A new...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In 1697, William Congreve wrote, "Music has charms to sooth a savage Beast." According to a new study from Northwestern University, music has charms to improve the brain as well. The impact of music is a hot topic in research circles, and researchers have found that a little musical training in childhood goes a long way in improving how the brain functions in adulthood, especially in areas of listening and processing sound. The...
MGH team uses functional imaging to find neurons sensitive to distance but not loudness Researchers at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a portion of the brain responsible for determining how far away a sound originates, a process that does not rely solely on how loud the sound is. The investigators' report, which will appear in the early edition of Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, is receiving early online release...
New location of critical area provides hints on origin of language Scientists have long believed that human speech is processed towards the back of the brain's cerebral cortex, behind auditory cortex where all sounds are received — a place famously known as Wernicke's area after the German neurologist who proposed this site in the late 1800s based on his study of brain injuries and strokes. But, now, research that analyzed more than 100 imaging studies concludes that Wernicke's area...
Brain circuits for visual categorization revealed by new experiments Hundreds of times during a baseball game, the home plate umpire must instantaneously categorize a fast-moving pitch as a ball or a strike. In new research from the University of Chicago, scientists have pinpointed an area in the brain where these kinds of visual categories are encoded. While monkeys played a computer game in which they had to quickly determine the category of a moving visual stimulus, neural recordings...
People with dyslexia often struggle with the ability to accurately decode and identify what they read. Although disrupted processing of speech sounds has been implicated in the underlying pathology of dyslexia, the basis of this disruption and how it interferes with reading comprehension has not been fully explained. Now, new research published by Cell Press in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron finds that a specific abnormality in the processing of auditory signals accounts for the...
The study, initiated by the Swiss researchers and published in Nature, constitutes ground-breaking work in exploring emotions in the brain. Anxiety disorders constitute a complex family of pathologies affecting about 10% of adults. Patients suffering from such disorders fear certain situations or objects to exaggerated extents totally out of proportion to the real danger they present. The amygdala, a deep-brain structure, plays a key part in processing fear and anxiety. Its functioning can...
Motherhood is associated with the acquisition of a host of new behaviors that must be driven, at least in part, by alterations in brain function. Now, new research published by Cell Press in the October 20 issue of the journal Neuron provides intriguing insight into how neural changes associated with the integration of odors and sounds underlie a mother's ability to recognize and respond to distress calls from her pups. "We know that distinct brain changes are linked with motherhood, but...
Early intervention could prevent slide toward speech comprehension difficulties A new study by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows that declines in hearing ability may accelerate gray mater atrophy in auditory areas of the brain and increase the listening effort necessary for older adults to successfully comprehend speech. When a sense (taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch) is altered, the brain reorganizes and adjusts. In the case of...
The part of the brain that uses hearing to determine sound location is reorganized in deaf animals to locate visual targets, according to a new study by a team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Western Ontario in Canada.These findings propose a new theory for cross-modal plasticity: loss of one sensory modality is substituted by another while maintaining the original function of the brain region.It is known that persons who have suffered major sensory...
