Biology subjects

Norman-Haignere, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Norman-Haignere, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Neurons in auditory cortex integrate information within constrained temporal windows that are invariant to the stimulus context and information rate

Much remains unknown about the computations that allow animals to flexibly integrate across multiple timescales in natural sounds. One key question is whether multiscale integration is accomplished by diverse populations of neurons, each of which integrates information within a constrained temporal window, or whether individual units effectively integrate across many different temporal scales depending on the information rate. Here, we show that responses from neurons throughout the ferret auditory cortex are nearly completely unaffected by sounds falling beyond a time-limited "integration window". This window varies substantially across cells within the auditory cortex ([~]15 to [~]150 ms), increasing substantially from primary to non-primary auditory cortex across all cortical layers, but is unaffected by the information rate of sound. These results indicate that multiscale computation is predominantly accomplished by diverse and hierarchically organized neural populations, each of which integrates information within a highly constrained temporal window.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

The human language system does not support music processing

Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of the language system located within Brocas area. However, others have failed to find overlap. Using a robust individual-subject fMRI approach, we examined the responses of language brain regions to music stimuli, and probed the musical abilities of individuals with severe aphasia. Across four experiments, we obtained a clear answer: music perception does not engage the language system, and judgments about music structure are possible even in the presence of severe damage to the language network. In particular, the language regions responses to music are generally low, often below the fixation baseline, and never exceed responses elicited by non-music auditory conditions, like animal sounds. Further, the language regions are not sensitive to music structure: they show low responses to intact and structure-scrambled music, and to melodies with vs. without structural violations. Finally, in line with past patient investigations, individuals with aphasia who cannot judge sentence grammaticality perform well on melody well-formedness judgments. Thus the mechanisms that process structure in language do not appear to process music, including music syntax.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Intracranial recordings from human auditory cortex reveal a neural population selective for musical song

How are neural representations of music organized in the human brain? While neuroimaging has suggested some segregation between responses to music and other sounds, it remains unclear whether finer-grained organization exists within the domain of music. To address this question, we measured cortical responses to natural sounds using intracranial recordings from human patients and inferred canonical response components using a data-driven decomposition algorithm. The inferred components replicated many prior findings including distinct neural selectivity for speech and music. Our key novel finding is that one component responded nearly exclusively to music with singing. Song selectivity was not explainable by standard acoustic features and was co-located with speech- and music-selective responses in the middle and anterior superior temporal gyrus. These results suggest that neural representations of music are fractionated into subpopulations selective for different types of music, at least one of which is specialized for the analysis of song.

neuroscience↗