The sound of silence - brain areas responsible for auditory imagery

Main Category: Neurology / Neuroscience
Article Date: 14 Mar 2005 - 14:00 PDT


The brain areas responsible for auditory imagery - which occurs when you have a song stuck in your head or when you mentally run through telephone numbers, for example - is investigated in a Brief Communication in this week's Nature (p 158).

William M. Kelley and colleagues looked at the spontaneous and sometimes annoying forms of sound imagery that occur in everyday life. Subjects' brains were monitored while they passively listened to excerpts from familiar and unfamiliar songs with lyrics or instrumentals. Snippets of music were removed at different points during the soundtracks and replaced with silent gaps. All participants reported hearing a continuation of the familiar -- but not the unfamiliar -- tunes during the gaps in the music. The researchers found that gaps in songs familiar to the subjects induced more neural activity in the auditory association areas of the brain than gaps in unknown songs. Gaps in instrumental pieces produced additional activity in a neighbouring brain area, the primary auditory cortex, which also showed more activity for known tunes compared with unknown tunes.

The team suggest that these findings mirror the activity that occurs in the brain's visual areas during visual imagery. In both auditory and visual reconstructions, a linguistic association (such as adding lyrics to a melody or naming the object to be visualized) assists the reconstruction process.

Reference URL
http://www.nature.com/nature
SOURCE: alphagalileo.org

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