New Scientist
Image: all that improbable blue
It’s musical mind-reading. Your patterns of brain activity can show what song you are listening to.
In the area of the brain that processes sound – the auditory cortex – different neurons become active in response to different sound frequencies. So it should be possible to work out which musical note someone is listening to just by looking at this activity, says Geoff Boynton at the University of Washington in Seattle.
To find out, Boynton and his colleague Jessica Thomas had four volunteers listen to various notes, while they used fMRI to record the resulting neural activity. “Then the game is to play a song and use the neural activity to guess what was played,” he says.
They were able to identify melodies like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star from neural activity alone, Boynton told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, California, this week. Read more on newscientist.com…
