2001 Griffiths Uppenkamp Patterson Encoding Sound
<p>May 09, 2012 08:54 PM
 
2001 Nat Neurosci...
 
from Cambridge U.
 
We measured the neural activity associated with the temporal structure of sound in the human
auditory pathway from cochlear nucleus to cortex. The temporal structure includes regularities at
the millisecond level and pitch sequences at the hundreds-of-milliseconds level. Functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the whole brain with cardiac triggering allowed
simultaneous observation of activity in the brainstem, thalamus and cerebrum. This work shows
that the process of recoding temporal patterns into a more stable form begins as early as the
cochlear nucleus and continues up to auditory cortex...
 
Time resolution is > 10X  that of any other system in the brain.
 
neural firing in audit N is phase locked to basilar membrane motion up to 5000 hz.
 
But  NOT seen in higher nuclei of audit pathway... so how is it encoded in phenom like
pitch and voice id?
 
a form of autocorrelation may be used within each freq band to produce an audit IMAGE or pattern.
 
here we seek local brain activity that incr with degr of regularity in the stim.  see FIGURE 1.
 
 </p>