Tuning in to a new language on the fly: Effects of context and seasonality on songbird brain

Wednesday, August 6, 2008 - 03:35 in Biology & Nature

Research conducted at Rutgers University has shown that exposure to a changed acoustic and social environment can rewire the way the brain processes sounds. Beginning in the cochlea of the inner ear, nerve cells of the auditory system parse incoming sounds into their different components. Study of the responses of individual brain cells has shown that they respond best to a particular frequency (pitch) of sound, less well to nearby frequencies, and poorly to distant sound frequencies. The range of effective frequencies can be measured as the "tuning width." Cells with similar tuning are found together, producing an orderly map of all the possible frequencies spread out across the auditory part of the brain.

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