The meaning of sounds: Acoustic to semantic transformations in human auditory cortex

A bird chirping, a glass breaking, an ambulance passing by. Listening to sounds helps recognizing events and objects, even when they are out of sight, in the dark or behind a wall, for example. In this talk, I will discuss how the human brain transforms acoustic waveforms into meaningful representations of the sources, attempting to link theories, models and data from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence research.

Perception and neural coding of pitch through the lifespan: Peripheral and cortical considerations

Pitch is a primary perceptual attribute of our auditory world, playing a critical role in music, speech, and the organization of the auditory scene into perceptual objects. It has long been thought that stimulus timing information, conveyed by the auditory nerve, underlies and limits our exquisite sensitivity to differences in frequency, and our ability to detect very small fluctuations or modulations in frequency.

Encoding & decoding language representations in human cortex

Abstract: The meaning, or semantic content, of natural speech is represented in highly specific patterns of brain activity across a large portion of the human cortex. Using recently developed machine learning methods and very large fMRI datasets collected from single subjects, we can construct models that predict brain responses with high accuracy. Interrogating these models enables us to map language selectivity with unprecedented precision, and potentially uncover organizing principles.

What Happened to the 'Mental' in 'Mental" Disorders

People often seek help for mental problems because they are suffering subjectively. Yet, for decades, the subjective experience of patients has been marginalized. This is in part due to the dominant medical model of mental illness, which has tended to treat subjective experience as a quaint relic of a scientifically less enlightened time. To the extent that subjective symptoms are related to the underlying problem, it is often assumed that they will be taken care of if the more objective symptoms, such as behavioral and physiological responses are treated.

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