Chapter 10 - The Hearing Brain

Links and Media

Professor Daniel Levitin presents a TEDx lecture in which he describes his own view on how the evolution of the human brain made music possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAl2I30SoTA
The cocktail party problem discussed in light of new evidence from the effects of attention on auditory neurons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPQhMFxvaPM
Oliver Sachs, the famous neurologist and science writer, discusses amusia (based on his book Musicophilia): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPRW0wZ9NOM
A lecture from Professor Jamie Ward, author of The Student’s Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience on “The Hearing Brain”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxW-gGQfJhw

Interesting evidence for the existence of an auditory equivalent of the well-known simple and complex cells that were described decades ago in the visual cortex: Tian, B., Kusmierek, P., & Rauschecker, J. P. (2013). Analogues of simple and complex cells in rhesus monkey auditory cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(19), 7892–7897.
This paper is part of a wider project involving these authors that argues that the structure of music is derived from the structure of human speech and vocalizations: Bowling, D. L., Sundararajan, J., Han, S. E., & Purves, D. (2012). Expression of emotion in Eastern and Western music mirrors vocalization. PLoS One, 7(3). http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/beh/students-guide-to-cognitive-neuroscience-related-articles/
A modern critique of the motor theory of speech perception based on evidence from cognitive neuroscience: Lotto, A. J., Hickok, G. S., & Holt, L. L. (2009). Reflections on mirror neurons and speech perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(3), 110–114.