Auditory Cortex News and Research

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The auditory cortex is the region of the brain that is responsible for processing of auditory (sound) information. The primary auditory cortex is located in the temporal lobe. There are additional areas of the human cerebral cortex that are involved in processing sound, in the frontal and parietal lobes.

Research shows speech recognition problems independent of hearing loss

Older adults may have difficulty understanding speech because of age-related changes in brain tissue, according to new research in the May 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

12 May 2009

Hearing could hold key to unlocking schizophrenia mystery

Measuring brain waves in response to hearing a variety of tones appears to be a useful way to begin understanding the underlying genetic abnormalities associated with schizophrenia, says a study headed by researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital.

17 Mar 2009

Aging brain easily distracted

Canadian researchers have found more evidence that older adults aren't able to filter out distracting information as well as younger adults.

25 Nov 2008

The interaction between genes and behavior

Our DNA determines a lot about who we are and how we play with others, but recent studies of social animals (birds and bees, among others) show that the interaction between genes and behavior is more of a two-way street than most of us realize.

7 Nov 2008

People with tune deafness able to detect a wrong note unconsciously

People with tune deafness aren't able to tell when a musician accidentally strikes the wrong note in a song, but their brains know the difference. Researchers from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health, have found that people with tune deafness, an auditory processing disorder in which a person with normal hearing has trouble distinguishing notes in a melody, are able to detect a wrong note unconsciously.

11 Jun 2008

Do humans hear better than animals?

It is known that various species of land and water-based living creatures are capable of hearing some lower and higher frequencies than humans are capable of detecting.

2 Apr 2008

Youngest patient worldwide to have auditory implant in the brain stem

A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra, led by doctors Manuel Manrique Rodríguez, specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery and Bartolomé Bejarano Herruzo, specialist in paediatric neurosurgery, have successfully operated on a 13 month-old girl from Murcia, who had been born deaf due to the lack of auditory nerves.

27 Feb 2008

Intervention program boosts education of kids at high risk of failure

An eight-week-long intervention program aimed at parents from low socioeconomic backgrounds reaped significant educational benefits in their preschool-aged children, a University of Oregon research fellow reported today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

17 Feb 2008

New understanding of sound representations in the auditory cortex

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have reported new findings about how the mammalian brain interprets and fashions representations of sound that may help explain how we are able to focus on one particular sound among many in noisy environments such as offices or cocktail parties.

30 Jan 2008

New auditory cortex research may bring better hearing aids and more effective speech recognition systems

Recognising people, objects or animals by the sound they make is an important survival skill and something most of us take for granted.

15 Jan 2008

Auditory neurons in humans far more sensitive to fine sound frequencies than most mammals

The human ear is exquisitely tuned to discern different sound frequencies, whether such tones are high or low, near or far.

11 Jan 2008

Researchers tackle phantom sounds of tinnitus

For the more than 50 million Americans who experience the phantom sounds of tinnitus -- ringing in the ears that can range from annoying to debilitating -- certain well-trained rats may be their best hope for finding relief.

8 Oct 2007

Selective attention increases both gain and feature selectivity of the human auditory cortex

On Sept. 19, a research report by Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Computational Engineering scientists will appear in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, showing that selective attention increases both gain and feature selectivity of the human auditory cortex.

20 Sep 2007