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A study to be published in Nature Neuroscience next month by Wong and colleagues suggests that early musical training enhances the capacity of the brainstem to track pitch changes in tone-based languages such as Mandarin, ostensibly observed through evoked responses¹. It’s a particularly interesting finding in that plasticity related to such high level cognition is usually associated with with the cerebral cortex; while the brainstem does extract features for speech processing, plastic changes were only thought to be of significance with profound changes in auditory experience, such as in congenital deafness.

I’m still curious about their actual methodology, their sample, discussions of sensitive periods and their implications for clinical interventions and so fourth, but that’ll have to wait a couple of weeks until the actual unmolested paper becomes available.

Press Release (via Omni Brain)

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Awesome.

Link (via MakeBlog)

The mechanisms that combine multiple sensory modalities, beginning the formation of a complete percept, were explored by Kayser and colleagues - and it turns out that integration may occur earlier in the processing hierarchy than first thought.

J Neurosci2007; 27(8):1824.

Merging the information from different senses is essential for successful interaction with real-life situations. Indeed, sensory integration can reduce perceptual ambiguity, speed reactions,or change the qualitative sensory experience. It is widely held that integration occurs at later processing stages and mostly in higher association cortices; however, recent studies suggest that sensory convergence can occur in primary sensory cortex. A good model for early convergence proved to be the auditory cortex, which can be modulated by visual and tactile stimulation; however, given the large number and small size of auditory fields, neither human imaging nor microelectrode recordings have systematically identified which fields are susceptible to multisensory influences. To reconcile findings from human imaging with anatomical knowledge from nonhuman primates, we exploited high-resolution imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of the macaque monkey to study the modulation of auditory processing by visual stimulation. Using a functional parcellation of auditory cortex, we localized modulations to individual fields. Our results demonstrate that both primary (core) and nonprimary (belt) auditory fields can be activated by the mere presentation of visual scenes. Audiovisual convergence was restricted to caudal fields [prominently the core field (primary auditory cortex) and belt fields (caudomedial field, caudolateral field, and mediomedial field)] and continued in the auditory parabelt and the superior temporal sulcus. The same fields exhibited enhancement of auditory activation by visual stimulation and showed stronger enhancement for less effective stimuli, two characteristics of sensory integration. Together, these findings reveal multisensory modulation of auditory processing prominently in caudal fields but also at the lowest stages of auditory cortical processing.

Link (via Science Daily)