By IANS
London : The part of the brain that deals with sound is unique to each individual and the world would sound very different if we were to hear it through someone else’s ears, a new study has found.
The study, by researchers at Oxford University, looked at how the ear and brain help us understand our acoustic environment and found that the part of the brain’s auditory cortex is adapted in each individual and tuned to the world around us.
“Our research has shown that auditory neurons in the brain are adaptable and we learn how to locate and identify sounds,” said lead researcher Jan Schnupp.
“Each person’s auditory cortex is adapted to the way their ears deliver sound to them and their experience of the world. If you could borrow someone else’s ears you would have real difficulty in locating the source of sounds, at least until your brain had relearned how to do it,” Schnupp said.
Findings of the study have been published in Business, the journal of Britain’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
When the researchers looked at how the auditory cortex responded to changes in pitch, timbre and frequency they saw that most neurons reacted to each change.
“In the closely related visual cortex there are different neurons for processing colour, form and motion. In the auditory cortex the neurons seem to overwhelmingly react to several of the different properties of sound. We are now investigating how they distinguish between pitch, spatial location and timbre,” said Schnupp.
“If we can understand how the auditory cortex has evolved to do this we may be able to apply the knowledge to develop hearing aids that can blot out background noise and speech recognition systems that can handle different accents,” he added.