NEWS FEED


  • Student wins National prize
    Congratulations to our undergraduate project student‚ student Amy Gibb who has won a prize from the Experimental Psychology Society for her work on pitch perception.
  • Brain oscillations in tinnitus A study by Will in Brain demonstrates oscillatory activity in auditory cortex in single subjects during tinnitus.
  • Unpleasant sounds & the brain A study by Sukhbinder published in the Journal of Neuroscience describes the brain mechanisms for the analysis of unpleasant sounds.
  • Piano tuners' brains A study by Sundeep and Sukhbinder published in the Journal of Neuroscience describes changes in the structure of the brain in professional piano tuners.
  • Links between auditory analysis and phonological skillA study by Manon published in Proceedings of the Royal Society links auditory sequence analysis to phonological skill.
  • Thomas wins BNPA PrizeThomas wins the British Neuropsychiatry Association Alywn Lishman prize 2012 for his work on rhythm analysis in basal-ganglia disorders.
  • Rhythm work featured at the Science Museum, LondonThe Wellcome Trust gallery at the Science Museum, London features an interactive interview of Sundeep in a special section on Can you feel the beat?
  • Primer on brain bases for pitchA recent set of reviews suitable for non-specialists about brain mechanisms for pitch is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Auditory cognition (the mind's ear) describes a group of processes by which the brain makes sense of the sound world. We study the normal processes and how these go wrong in brain disorders.

We study the normal perception of complex sound relevant to the analysis of speech, music and environmental sounds and the brain bases for this. We study the brain bases using functional imaging with functional MRI and magnetoencephalography and depth electrode recordings in neurosurgical patients. The work concerns auditory perception and involves the auditory system in the brainstem and auditory cortex. But auditory cognition also involves attention, memory and emotional responses and requires many brain systems that are not conventionally considered parts of the auditory brain.

We also study the effect of brain disorders on auditory cognition. A number of disorders are associated with deficient auditory cognition including common developmental disorders (e.g. tone deafness), acquired disorders (e.g. stroke) and degenerative disorders (e.g. dementia). Tinnitus and auditory hallucinations are derangements of auditory cognition.

Work is carried out at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University and the Wellcome Trust Centre for NeuroImaging at University College London. Depth electrode recordings on neurosurgical patients are carried out with colleagues in the Department of Neurosurgery in Iowa. Members of our group are based at all three centres.