Spatiotemporal whole-brain dynamics of auditory patterns recognition

Abstract

Music is a universal non-verbal human language, built on logical structures and articulated in balanced hierarchies between sounds, offering excellent opportunities to explore how the brain creates meaning for complex spatiotemporal auditory patterns. Using the high temporal resolution of magnetoencephalography in 70 participants, we investigated their unfolding brain dynamics during the recognition of Johann Sebastian Bach's original musical patterns compared to new variations thereof. Remarkably, the recognition of Bach's original music ignited a widespread music processing brain network comprising primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus, insula, frontal operculum, cingulate gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex, basal ganglia and hippocampus. Furthermore, both activity and connectivity increased over time, following the evolution and unfolding of Bach's original patterns. This study shed new light on brain activity and connectivity dynamics underlying auditory patterns recognition, highlighting the crucial role of fast neural phase synchronization underlying meaningful, complex cognitive processes.

Putting Cells in Motion: Advantages of Endogenous Boosting of BDNF Production

“…Furthermore, music listening, besides involving the drive to move (with dancing), is in and of itself a memory process: when we listen, we implicitly encode repeated melodic and rhythmic patterns, and are able to recognise them later on. In a recent study, we identified the systemic brain network changes in temporo-frontal brain areas, including the hippocampus, associated with these memory processes [ 163 ] ( Figure 2 ). Future research could proceed in this direction and determine whether BDNF-related neuroplastic processes and the associated brain network changes could be triggered simply by passive exposure, namely by just listening to music without playing, as animal studies seem to indicate.…”

Synchrony in the periphery: inter-subject correlation of physiological responses during live music concerts

“…Although previous work on naturalistic music has correlated neural and physiological responses to dynamically changing acoustic features [1][2][3]50 , or extracted epochs based on information content in the music 12 , perhaps a more robust way to identify systematic responses to naturalistic stimuli is through analysing synchrony of responses 10,[55][56][57] , in particular via inter-subject correlation (ISC, see review 58 ). This method -in which (neural) responses are correlated across participants exposed to naturalistic stimuli 59 -is based on the assumption that signals not related to processing stimuli would not be correlated.…”

A potential marker for problematic mother-infant bonding revealed by magnetoencephalography study of first-time mothers listening to infant cries

“…The spheres model represented the MNI-co-registered anatomy as a simpler geometric model, allowing each sensor to be fitted with its own sphere (Hillebrand & Barnes, 2005). Finally, the beamforming used a diverse set of weights sequentially applied to the source locations to isolate the contribution of each source (brain voxel) to the activity recorded by the MEG channels for each time-point in order to isolate the contribution of each source (brain voxel) to the activity recorded by the MEG channels for each time-point (Bonetti et al, 2020; Brookes et al, 2007; Hillebrand & Barnes, 2005).…”

“…Then, we considered significant the original clusters that had a size bigger than the 99.9% of cluster sizes forming the reference distribution. Additional details on the MCS algorithm can be found in (Bonetti, Brattico, Bruzzone, et al, 2021;Bonetti, Brattico, Carlomagno, et al, 2021;Bonetti et al, 2020;Bruzzone et al, 2021).…”