Singing Neurons Discovered!

Group of neurons that respond to only singing in the human brain have been identified by neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge.

The team states that these neurons were found in the auditory cortex (brain region for processing sounds) and responded to only a specific combination of voice and music. These neurons were not activated to either regular speech or instrumental music.

‘Neuroscientists successfully identify the population of neurons in the human brain that fires particularly to singing, and not other types of music. ’

The team used a technique known as electrocorticography (ECoG - allows electrical activity to be recorded by electrodes placed inside the skull) combined with the mathematical method and fMRI data from their 2015 study to decode their new findings.

"The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music. There's one population of neurons that responds to singing, and then very nearby is another population of neurons that responds broadly to lots of music. At the scale of fMRI, they're so close that you can't disentangle them, but with intracranial recordings, we get additional resolution, and that's what we believe allowed us to pick them apart," says Sam Norman-Haignere, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

The team further hopes to learn more about what aspects of singing drive the responses of these neurons.

Source: Medindia