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Day Old Chickens Prefer The Same Music That You Do

By Jason G. Goldman You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you’ve also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you’ve got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that humans tend to find pleasant is called consonant, which are different from from unpleasant sounds, which are called dissonant. Think of the difference between a Mozart sonata and fingernails on a chalkboard, and you’re on the right track. Consonant notes sound – to the untrained ear – as if they were a single tone, while a you can identify multiple tones within a dissonant note. This might be related to the human preference for harmonics, since in humans, the preference for consonant sounds are associated with preferences for harmonic spectra (harmonic relationships between frequencies), while dissonant sounds are not. It might be easiest to understand by listening to these melodies. The melodies are the same, but the first one is consonant (composed of minor and major thirds) and the second one is dissonant (composed of minor seconds). Turn your speakers up: Two-month-old human babies prefer to listen to consonant music rather than dissonant music. As early as one to three days after birth, human infant brains can distinguish between consonant and dissonant music – though it is unclear if there is a preference at that early age. Songbirds like Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) and European starlings (Sternus vulgaris) can distinguish consonant from dissonant music as well, though, like day-old human infants, it is unclear if there is a preference. Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) can distinguish the two types of tones, though no preference has been observed in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). There was one human-raised chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) that preferred consonant music. Taken together, the evidence for the musical preferences of humans and non-human animals is a bit…dissonant. No harmony to be found here. © 2011 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16015 - Posted: 11.11.2011

Cover Your Ears!

by Kim Krieger Some sounds are excruciating. Take fingernails squeaking on a chalkboard. The noise makes many people shudder, but researchers never knew exactly why. A new study finds that there are two factors at work: the knowledge of where the sound is coming from and the unfortunate design of our ear canals. Previous research found that the painful parts of unpleasant sounds appear to be in the middle range of audible frequencies. But scientists didn’t nail down exactly which frequencies or explain why the sounds were painful. So musicologists Michael Oehler of the Macromedia University for Media and Communication in Cologne, Germany, and Christoph Reuter of the University of Vienna asked listeners to rank sounds in a listening test. Fingernails raking against a chalkboard and chalk squeaking against slate were the most unpleasant sounds from a family of recordings, which also included sounds such as Styrofoam squeaks and scraping a plate with a fork. The researchers then modified the recordings of fingernails and chalk, removing or attenuating various frequency ranges. They also modified the sounds by selectively extracting either the tonal, musical-pitch parts or the scraping, growling, noiselike parts of the sound. Some listeners were told the true source of the sounds, whereas others were told that the sounds were part of contemporary musical compositions. The same listeners then rated the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the sounds while the researchers measured physical indicators of distress: the listeners’ heart rate, blood pressure, and the electrical conductivity of their skin. As they will report next week at the Acoustical Society of America conference in San Diego, California, Oehler and Reuter found that a listener’s skin conductivity changed significantly when the person heard a sound he or she later reported as unpleasant, showing that disturbing sounds do cause a measurable physical reaction. More surprisingly, they found that the frequencies responsible for making a sound unpleasant were commonly found in human speech, which ranges from 150 to 7000 hertz (Hz). The offending frequencies were in the range of 2000 to 4000 Hz. Removing those made the sounds much easier to listen to. Deleting the tonal parts of the sound entirely also made listeners perceive the sound as more pleasant, whereas removing other frequencies or the noisy, scraping parts of the sound made little difference. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 15958 - Posted: 10.29.2011

A Hearing Aid That Cuts Out All the Clatter

By JOHN TIERNEY After he lost much of his hearing last year at age 57, the composer Richard Einhorn despaired of ever really enjoying a concert or musical again. Even using special headsets supplied by the Metropolitan Opera and Broadway theaters, he found himself frustrated by the sound quality, static and interference. Then, in June, he went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, where his “Voice of Light” oratorio had once been performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, for a performance of the musical “Wicked.” There were no special headphones. This time, the words and music were transmitted to a wireless receiver in Mr. Einhorn’s hearing aid using a technology that is just starting to make its way into public places in America: a hearing loop. “There I was at ‘Wicked’ weeping uncontrollably — and I don’t even like musicals,” he said. “For the first time since I lost most of my hearing, live music was perfectly clear, perfectly clean and incredibly rich.” His reaction is a common one. The technology, which has been widely adopted in Northern Europe, has the potential to transform the lives of tens of millions of Americans, according to national advocacy groups. As loops are installed in stores, banks, museums, subway stations and other public spaces, people who have felt excluded are suddenly back in the conversation. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Lifelong music training may help stave off hearing loss

By Linda Searing THE QUESTION Do lifelong musicians face the same hearing problems that other people do as they age? THIS STUDY involved 163 adults, including 74 characterized as lifelong musicians because they started music training by age 16, had at least six years of formal lessons on a musical instrument and were continuing to practice at the time the study began. The group included both amateurs and professionals, who played a variety of instruments. All participants took a series of hearing tests that checked such things as the ability to detect sounds that grew increasingly quiet, to detect short gaps in otherwise continuous sound, to hear sound variations in a noisy environment and to distinguish words in the presence of background noise. Little difference was found between the groups in hearing diminishing sounds. But in all other auditory tests, musicians processed sound better than non-musicians, with the gap widening with age. For instance, a 70-year-old musician understood speech in a noisy environment as well as a 50-year-old non-musician. Among the musicians, the more they practiced, the better they scored on the hearing tests. WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Anyone who wants to stave off hearing loss. With age, hearing tends to dim overall, and many people have trouble hearing certain sounds and following conversations in a noisy place, such as a restaurant. This affects about a third of people by age 60, and nearly half by age 75. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

First superfast muscles in mammals help bats catch prey

By Leila Battison Science reporter Bats are able to locate their prey using echolocation produced by a special kind of "superfast" muscle, scientists have found. These specially adapted muscles can contract 100 times quicker than most of the muscles in human bodies. This is the first time such muscles have been seen in mammals, although they had previously been found in rattlesnakes, some fish and birds. The Danish findings are published in the journal Science. Bats use echolocation to navigate in total darkness, as well as to catch flying insects in mid air. In order to pinpoint the insects with enough accuracy and speed to catch them before they fly away, the bats need to make a lot of calls in rapid succession. As the bat approaches its prey target, the frequency of calls increases up to about 190 calls per second, creating what is known as the "terminal buzz". Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark, led by Prof Coen Elemans, designed tests to investigate just how fast the terminal buzz could be. They discovered that the maximum frequency of the buzz was not limited by the echo return time, but was controlled by the muscles in a bat's throat. BBC © 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 15858 - Posted: 10.01.2011

Ringing in ears may have deeper source

By Laura Sanders The high-pitched ringing, squealing, hissing, clicking, roaring, buzzing or whistling in the ears that can drive tinnitus sufferers crazy may be a by-product of the brain turning up the volume to cope with subtle hearing loss, a new study suggests. The results, published in the Sept. 21 Journal of Neuroscience, may help scientists understand how the condition arises. Tinnitus is clearly a disorder of the brain, not the ear, says study coauthor Roland Schaette of the University College London Ear Institute. One convincing piece of evidence: Past attempts to cure the condition by severing the auditory nerve in desperate patients left people completely deaf to the outside world — but didn’t silence the ringing. How the brain creates the maddeningly persistent phantom noise remains a mystery. Usually, tinnitus is tied to some degree of measurable hearing loss, but not always. “We’ve known for a long time that there are people who report tinnitus whose audiograms are normal,” says auditory neuroscientist Larry Roberts of McMaster University in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “It has been a puzzle to figure out these exceptions to the rule.” Schaette and coauthor David McAlpine, also of the UCL Ear Institute, suggest that these exceptions may actually be due to “hidden hearing loss” that shirks detection in standard hearing tests. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Why harmony pleases the brain

by Lisa Grossman The key to pleasant music may be that it pleases our neurons. A new model suggests that harmonious musical intervals trigger a rhythmically consistent firing pattern in certain auditory neurons, and that sweet sounds carry more information than harsh ones. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have known that two tones whose frequencies were related by a simple ratio like 2:1 (an octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth) produce the most pleasing, or consonant, musical intervals. This effect doesn't depend on musical training – infants and even monkeys can hear the difference. But it was unclear whether consonant chords are easier on the ears because of the way the sound waves combine in the air, or the way our brains convert them to electrical impulses. A new mathematical model presents a strong case for the brain. "We have found that the reason for this difference is somewhere at the level of neurons," says Yuriy Ushakov at the N. I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhniy Novgorod in Russia. Ushakov and colleagues considered a simple mathematical model of the way sound travels from the ear to the brain. In their model, two sensory neurons react to different tones. Each sends an electrical signal to a third neuron, called an interneuron, which sends a final signal to the brain. The model's interneuron fires when it receives input from either or both sensory neurons. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 15820 - Posted: 09.20.2011

Study uncovers mechanism behind hearing condition

By Nicholas Luther A study by a team of UC Berkeley neuroscientists has uncovered new cerebral mechanisms behind tinnitus, a currently incurable condition that produces a constant ringing or buzzing sound in the ear in the absence of other noise. The study, published Sept. 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides an alternative hypothesis to the prevailing view that tinnitus is associated with neurons in the region of the cortex that is affected by hearing loss. The research, which was conducted by the UC Berkeley Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, shows that the higher-frequency neurons in the area of the cortex affected by hearing loss are responsible for the high-pitched noise characteristic of tinnitus. According to Shaowen Bao, co-author of the study and adjunct assistant professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, this study is the first to attribute tinnitus to the sensory-deprived region — which is affected by hearing loss — of the cortex. “Researchers have come up with the prevailing theory based on numerous studies and findings,” he said. “However, these findings are somewhat inconsistent. We hope we can get a more coherent idea of what’s happening.” According to the American Tinnitus Association, tinnitus affects more than 50 million Americans with varying degrees of severity ranging from barely noticeable to debilitating. Although scientists have yet to identify a cure for the condition, popular treatment options include masking the tinnitus noise with music, which provides temporary relief, and training the neurons in the auditory cortex to enhance their response to lost frequencies, which helps to gradually reconnect the ear to the sensory-deprived neurons. © Copyright 2011 The Daily Californian

Bats eavesdrop to learn to hunt

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Big brown bats learn to hunt by eavesdropping on the sonar of other bats, according to researchers. A team from the University of Maryland, US, tracked bats as they flew around a room hunting for a mealworm suspended from the ceiling. Young bats that flew with "experienced" bats - that had been trained to find the worm - were quickly able to find the treat alone. The results are published in the journal Animal Behaviour. They are the first to show that the bats (Eptesicus fuscus) actively attend to the sonar of others in order to learn from them. This social learning is important to many mammals, but it had not been clearly demonstrated in bats. Genevieve Spanjer Wright, a graduate student from the University of Maryland led the research. She and her colleagues trained 12 "demonstrator bats" to catch a mealworm suspended from the ceiling by a string. By repeatedly changing the location of the food item, the researchers trained the bats to actively hunt for it using their sonar or echolocation pulses. BBC © 2011

How the Ear Distinguishes Sweet Sounds From Sour Notes

by Kim Krieger A mathematical model may explain how the nerves in your ear sense harmony, a team of biophysicists reports. The model suggests that pleasant harmonies cause neurons to fire in regular patterns whereas discordant notes stimulate messier neuron activity. Strike the middle C on a piano and hold it. Count two white keys to the right and hit the A. The bright and pleasing sound of a major third fills the air. That unmistakable sensation of musical harmony depends on the frequencies of the sound waves that make the two notes. Consonant chords consist of musical notes whose frequencies form simple ratios such as 2/1 for an octave, 3/2 for a major fifth, or 5/4 for a major third. Dissonant chords have frequency ratios of big numbers such as 16/15 or 45/32. But scientists don’t know precisely how the ear and brain sense this mathematical difference. Now, Bernardo Spagnolo, a biophysicist at the University of Palermo in Italy and collaborators at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod in Russia have come up with a simple neurological model that does the trick. A sound wave sets your eardrum vibrating, which ultimately causes a spiraling membrane within the inner ear called the basilar membrane to vibrate, too. Exactly where along its length the membrane jiggles depends on the frequency of the sound, with higher frequencies causing jiggling farther along the tapering membrane. Those vibrations stimulate neurons that convey the frequency information to the brain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

By GUY GUGLIOTTA LOS ANGELES — There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston — 70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high — as just that space. Tyson Yaberg of Audyssey Laboratories listened to an experimental system at the University of Southern California. Audyssey’s goal is to make dens and living rooms sound like concert halls and movie theaters. Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was. At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special. But as engineers added combinations of speakers, the room seemed to expand and the music swelled in richness and depth, until finally it was as if the visitor were sitting with the audience in Boston. Then the music stopped and the lights came on. It turned out that the Immersive Audio Lab at U.S.C.’s Viterbi School of Engineering is dark, a bit dingy, and only 30 feet wide, 45 feet long and 14 feet high. © 2011 The New York Times Company

When a Chomp or a Slurp Is a Trigger for Outrage

By JOYCE COHEN For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage. Or as Adah Siganoff put it, “rage, panic, fear, terror and anger, all mixed together.” “The reaction is irrational,” said Ms. Siganoff, 52, of Alpine, Calif. “It is typical fight or flight” — so pronounced that she no longer eats with her husband. Many people can be driven to distraction by certain small sounds that do not seem to bother others — gum chewing, footsteps, humming. But sufferers of misophonia, a newly recognized condition that remains little studied and poorly understood, take the problem to a higher level. They also follow a strikingly consistent pattern, experts say. The condition almost always begins in late childhood or early adolescence and worsens over time, often expanding to include more trigger sounds, usually those of eating and breathing. Aage R. Moller, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas who specializes in the auditory nervous system, included misophonia in the “Textbook of Tinnitus,” a 2010 medical guide of which he was an editor. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Medical Mystery: How Can Some People Hear Their Own Eyeballs Move?

By Larry Greenemeier It sounds like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe tale of horror. A man becomes agitated by strange sounds only to find that they are emanating from inside his own body—his heart, his pulse, the very movement of his eyes in their sockets. Yet superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS) is a very real affliction caused by a small hole in the bone covering part of the inner ear. Such a breach results in distortion of hearing and, often, impaired balance. The human ear consists of three parts. The outer ear includes the ear lobe and external auditory canal, which funnels sound waves toward the eardrum (or tympanic membrane) allowing it to vibrate. The middle ear converts sound waves that vibrate the eardrum into mechanical vibrations for the cochlea, the hearing part of the inner ear. This area, however, also includes of a system of three fluid-filled semicircular canals in each ear—superior, posterior and horizontal—responsible for giving the brain information about angular motion of the head. SCDS can occur when some part of the bone protecting the superior semicircular canal is missing. Whereas it is difficult to know exactly how prevalent SCDS is, several reported cases define how it impacts the lives of those suffering from the disorder. Stephen Mabbutt, a 57-year-old Englishman who suffered from SCDS for six years, described "hearing his eyes scratching like sandpaper every time they moved in their sockets." He returned to work earlier this month after successful surgery to plug a pin-size hole in the bone covering the semicircular superior canal in one of his ears. Toby Spencer, a 41-year-old IT professional from Skowhegan, Maine, described similar symptoms as Mabbutt as well as the feeling that loud noises made him feel as though he was losing his balance. Spencer had surgery in April to correct the problem. © 2011 Scientific American

The sounds of movement

Bob Holmes, contributor HUMANS are very good at language. Computers are just beginning to cope with the complexities of speech, but almost every child masters language easily. This remarkable talent has led some anthropologists and psychologists to conclude that we have an innate "language instinct" - that evolution shaped our brains into language-learning devices. In Harnessed, psychologist Mark Changizi turns this argument on its head: instead of our brains adapting to language, he claims, language has evolved to take advantage of sound-processing skills the brain already possessed. Music has done the same, adapting itself to fit our brain's pre-existing talents and borrowing - harnessing - them for a new purpose. Our prelinguistic ancestors used their ears to inform them about events in their surroundings, and we are still good at this. Close your eyes for a moment and listen: not only can you hear a person walking nearby, but you know how close they are, whether they are going up or down stairs, often who they are and what their mood is, and whether they just filled a coffee mug or a water glass. You do that by discriminating many small details of the sounds you hear - the particular "clink" of a coffee mug, the characteristic rhythm of someone's gait, and the like. Crucially, most of this discrimination takes place subliminally, before your conscious mind assembles and labels the perception. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Crittervision: Enter the bat's world of sound

by Caroline Williams A bat would probably have no trouble imagining how it is to see like a human: some species have eyesight that is at least as good as ours, and some see better than us in dim light. For us to imagine their world, though, is somewhat trickier. Insect-eating bats and some fruit-eaters get much of the detail they need to find food through echolocation: clicks, squeals and screams that they belt out at up to 120 decibels. That's the volume of a passing ambulance siren. Thankfully they do it in ultrasound, above the range of human hearing. The echoes of these sounds give them a huge amount of information about their surroundings. The time it takes for an echo to return, for example, reveals the distance of an object, and the changes in the sound's frequency as it bounces off another creature can even reveal the speed and direction of the animal's movement. The sensitivity of echolocation is phenomenal. A study published last year found that some bats can detect differences in the distance between themselves and their prey with an accuracy of between 4 and 13 millimetres (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol 128, p 1467). For an insect-eating bat, that's enough to scoop up the insect with its wings before passing it to its mouth. Subtle differences in the tone of these sounds, meanwhile, reveal a bat's identity to its peers, in much the same way that we recognise someone's speaking voice (PLoS Computer Biology, vol 6, p e1000400). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

A Vine Bounces Back Sound to Signal Bats

By SINDYA N. BHANOO The Marcgravia evenia plant has dish-shaped leaves that bounce back echoes that bats can identify through echolocation. The vine, Marcgravia evenia, has dish-shaped leaves that bounce back echoes that are easy for the bats to identify through echolocation. “They have a very special kind of echo,” said the lead author, Ralph Simon, a biologist at the University of Ulm in Germany. “This echo is very loud and has a constant signature from different angles.” Dr. Simon and his colleagues trained bats in the laboratory to look for a feeder. They then placed it in different locations — attached to a dish-shaped leaf, an ordinary leaf or no leaf. The bats located the feeder in half the time when it was attached to a dish-shaped leaf. And that was good for the bats and the vine. “For the plants, it increases the success of pollination,” Dr. Simon said. “For the bats, it’s good because it helps them find the flowers faster — they have to make several hundred visits to flowers every night.” The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science, is one of the first to focus on the evolution of echo-acoustic signals in plants. Several hundred species of plants in the Neotropics rely on about 40 nectar-feeding bat species for pollination, Dr. Simon said. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 0: ; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 15633 - Posted: 07.30.2011

Sound Tracking: Harmonics Enable Bat to Focus on Prey Despite Noise

By John Matson After an echolocating bat locks on to an insect with its sonar beam, it can keep track of its prey despite receiving a slew of echoes from other objects—leaves, vines and so on. How does it separate echoes bouncing off its target from echoes bouncing off the surrounding clutter, especially when the echoes reach the bat at the same time? The key, according to a new study of echolocation in the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus), is that objects in a bat's sonar beam produce echoes of a different character depending on where they fall within the beam. The bat can focus on the echoes from the center of the beam, where their target lies, and discount those from clutter on the periphery. The study appears in the July 29 issue of Science. The distinction is enabled by the fact that the bats' sonar pulses have two distinct components, or harmonics, at different frequency levels. The higher-frequency harmonic forms a narrower beam than the widespread low harmonic, so central targets receive and reflect both harmonics in roughly equal measure. Off-target objects, on the other hand, fall outside the narrower beam of the high harmonic and thus reflect proportionally more of the low-frequency sounds. The harmonic structure also assists in isolating insect targets from background reflections—higher-frequency sounds diminish more quickly in air, so the high harmonic returns to the bat more weakly when reflected off of distant objects. © 2011 Scientific American

Fish With Sensitive Hearing

By JOHN S. SPARKS and CHRISTOPHER B. BRAUN Having departed the surreal landscape of the Ankarana tsingy with our precious collections, we head north to Antsiranana, a large town at the northern tip of Madagascar. Our focus now has shifted to obtaining data related to the evolution of hearing in the endemic Malagasy cichlids. As mentioned in a previous post, these fish have a highly modified gas bladder with elaborate anterior projections that actually enter the skull and come in contact with the inner ear. Any type of sound field will resonate within that air-filled cavity to vibrate, stimulating the ear. We have already shown that such fish have much more sensitive hearing than their relatives. We are trying to determine if there is an environmental correlation that might explain why some species have such sensitive hearing but others do not. Rivers can be very quiet places if they flow over a smooth flat bottom, but if the river bank contains richer three-dimensional structures like root masses or rock formations, the ambient noise can be so loud as to make hearing essentially useless. Most rivers contain both types of habitat, of course, so we’re here to see specifically where the fish are found and what the noise regime is like. Our first target is a species of Ptychochromis that has only been collected once before, and has never been examined alive. We head out over roads that skirt the northwestern flank of Montagne de Ambre (Amber Mountain), although these roads are more akin to boulder strewn canyons that put our 4WD vehicles to the test. After driving for a number of hours through trails barely wide enough for two people walking abreast, we run into mud so deep we are forced to turn back — there is not enough time for us to walk to our destination, so the most northerly cichlid ever collected in Madagascar will have to wait for another time. We are disappointed, but the smell of mud and Zebu excrement mélange is something we don’t mind leaving behind. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 15449 - Posted: 06.18.2011

Can Brain Scans Predict Music Sales?

by Greg Miller Scientific inspiration sometimes comes from unlikely sources. Two years ago, Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, was on the couch with his kids watching American Idol. One of the contestants sang the melancholy hit song Apologize by the alternative rock band OneRepublic, and something clicked in Berns's mind. He'd used the song a few years earlier in a study on the neural mechanisms of peer pressure, in this case, how teenagers' perceptions of a song's popularity influence how they rate the song themselves. At the time, OneRepublic had yet to sign its first record deal. A student in Bern's lab had pulled a clip of Apologize from the band's MySpace page to use in the study. When Berns heard the song on American Idol, he wondered whether anything in the brain scan data his team had collected could have predicted it would become a hit. At the time, all 120 songs used in the experiment were by artists who were unsigned and not widely known. "The next day, in the lab, we talked about it." To find out what had become of the songs, the lab bought a subscription to Nielsen SoundScan, a service that tracks music sales. The database contained sales data for 87 of the 120 songs (not surprisingly, many songs had languished in MySpace obscurity). Berns reexamined the functional magnetic resonance imaging scans his group had collected from 27 adolescents in 2007, looking for regions of the brain where neural activity during a 15-second clip of a song correlated with the subject's likeability ratings. Two regions stood out: the orbitofrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. "That was a good check that we were on the right track, because we knew from a ton of other studies that those regions are heavily linked to reward and anticipation," Berns says. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 15418 - Posted: 06.11.2011

Spotting newborns at risk of hearing loss

By Nathan Seppa A simple DNA test of saliva from a newborn can reveal whether the baby has a viral infection that can cause deafness in some cases. The DNA test is simpler and faster than the assay currently available and catches more than 97 percent of such infections, researchers report in the June 2 New England Journal of Medicine. “This is really exciting,” says Elizabeth Stehel, a pediatrician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, who wasn’t involved in the study. Such a test “would fill the need that many people feel we have — to screen babies to detect a virus that contributes to so much hearing loss.” Cytomegalovirus is in the herpes virus family. Although it is common in the population and typically innocuous, cytomegalovirus can be dangerous to babies born with the infection, causing hearing loss in 10 to 15 percent of infected newborns. It is among the leading causes of deafness in children. Hospitals can spot some cytomegalovirus infections, particularly those that cause severe disabilities. Doctors routinely test all newborns for genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease by sending dried blood samples to a state’s central laboratory. Yet few hospitals test for congenital cytomegalovirus in babies who appear healthy, even though it is present in about 0.5 to 1 percent of such newborns. Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham recently found that blood tests of newborns often can’t predict whether the child is infected with the virus. Cytomegalovirus apparently doesn’t always get into the bloodstream in newborns, says Suresh Boppana, a pediatrician and infectious disease researcher at the UAB School of Medicine. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

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