"It flitted through my mind and I thought, 'No, I'll be fine'," says Clunes, whose prominent auditory organs have become something of a trademark since the days of Men Behaving Badly.
They found that those students whose brains' auditory hubs responded consistently over time to the repeated "da" syllable were also the ones who could keep up with the metronome's beat.
Finally, the workflow employed here has the additional advantage of enabling morphological and histological analyses of specimens whose individual auditory sensitivities were previously measured.
Audio clips courtesy of Diana Deutsch, whose CDs of auditory illusions can be found at Philomel Records.
Over a century ago, famed Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler invented the term "schizophrenia" to classify the mental illness whose symptoms included auditory and visual hallucinations, catatonia, paranoia, and disorganized thoughts in hopes that we would stop calling sufferers "bat-shit crazy" and find a way to actually treat them.
We investigated these alternative hypotheses in the barn owl, Tyto alba, an auditory predator whose sound localization is guided by activity on a topographic representation of auditory space in the external nucleus of its inferior colliculus [ICx], [18,19].
It is thus possible that postsynaptic dysbindin-1A reduction in auditory cortices in schizophrenia contributes to the many abnormalities in auditory information processing in the disorder [61], [62], including auditory hallucinations whose frequency and severity are significantly associated with volume reductions of the STG [39] [42].
We presented listeners with competing auditory streams whose amplitude varied independently and a visual stimulus with varying radius, while manipulating the cross-modal temporal relationships.
In the superior colliculus (to which IC projects), there are spatially tuned auditory neurons, whose stimulation produces movements of fixed amplitude and direction, independently of stimulation strength, and they are arranged topographically.
