Cocktail Parties, the status symbol of the modern society. Whether it is formal conference or a social get-together, cocktail parties always hold an alluring place in any event. Men holding finest liquor, standing in circles, participating in short talks, cheering-up, sharing experiences. Well, the topic of the conversation varies from philosophical opinions to variety of necktie available in a well-known store. Last weekend, I attended one such cocktail party at a defense club, which I found boring so I decided to sit on the couch with my drink and observe people. After sometime, an idea cracked into my mind, “Do our brain respond differently in Cocktail Parties?”
Suppose you’re at a cocktail party, and, like at most cocktail parties, there are a handful of conversations happening around the room. Have you ever wonder despite the tedious roar of laughter and dialogue, you have no trouble focusing on the voice of the person with whom you are speaking? You see her eyes and lips moving and you understand every word she is saying. But as often happens, you begin to lose interest in the conversation. Though you continue to nod your head and say things like, “Uh-huh, Oh really?” you consciously turn your attention to a hoot wit of a more tempting conversation happening elsewhere in the room.
How is it that in a blink of an eye, we’re able to selectively refocus our auditory attention to a distant conversation, while ignoring the conversation that’s happening right in front of us? The answer, it turns out, is a mystery of our beautiful mind.
According to Anthony Zador, a Professor of Biology and Program Chair of Neuroscience at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the brain mechanisms responsible for any kind of attention, whether visual or auditory, are probably not fundamentally different. However, the challenge of understanding how the brain focus on one sound whilst ignoring the rest (a.k.a. the cocktail party problem) is twofold. With the advent of computers, scientists trying programming computers to recognize speech in controlled situations and quiet rooms as far back as ten years ago, but when deployed in real world settings with background noise their algorithms fail completely. According to Dr. Zador, the first issue with computation is: We have a whole bunch of different sounds and from a bunch of different sources and they are superimposed at the level of the ears and somehow they’re added together and to us it’s typically pretty effortless to separate out those different threads of the conversation, but actually that’s a surprisingly difficult task.
The second issue is one of selection. When we listen to one conversation over another, we are choosing to redirect our auditory attention, but neuroscientists have yet to discover how the routing of these decisions happens. Now we know that the cochlea in our ears receives sound waves. Within the cochlea, there are neurons that are exquisitely sensitive to minute changes in pressure. Together, these neurons act in the cochlea as a spectral analyzer—some are sensitive to low frequency sounds, others are sensitive to middle frequency sounds and others are sensitive to high frequency sounds—and each is coded separately along a set of nerve fibers that lead to the brain’s thalamus. The thalamus acts as a “modulator” for all sensory inputs, converting distinctly different input from the eyes and ears into a “standard form” before passing it to the cortex of the brain.
Attention is a special case of routing sensory inputs where brain faces problem all the time, because when you attend to let’s say your sounds rather than your visual input or when you attend to one particular auditory input out of many, what you’re doing is your selecting some subset of the inputs. Elucidating the mechanism underlying attention is the basis of Zador’s research.
Goal of the current research is to understand how attention works in humans, but the neural activity of rodents is more easily manipulated and analyzed than that of primate monkeys or humans. To study the auditory attention of rodents, Zador’s designed a special behavioral box in which his colleagues and he have trained rodents to perform attentional tasks. The setup looks like a miniature sized talk-show set, in which the participant—a rat—is asked to choose between three ports by sticking his nose through a whole. When the rat sticks his nose through the center port, he breaks an LED beam that signals a computer to deliver a specified type of stimuli, such as a high or low frequency sound. When the computer presents a low frequency sound, for example, the rat goes to one of the ports and then gets a reward, a small amount of water. If the rat breaks the beam and receives a different frequency sound, he goes to the other port and gets a reward. After a while, the rat understands what he is supposed to do and more quickly reacts to the differing frequencies. Then, the rat was challenged by masking the frequencies with low levels of white noise.
Experiments demonstrate that rats can take sound stimuli and use it to guide their behavior from one port to the other. It also provides a basis to present the rats with more complicated tasks that demand the rats’ attention, like manipulating when the high or low frequency is presented and how much it is masked by a distracter sounds. Group has found that when the rats ramp up their attention in expectation of hearing the sounds, the speed with which he responds to the target is faster than if the target comes unexpectedly. As one of the hallmarks of attention: an improvement in performance as measured by either speed or accuracy. Researcher also found that there are neurons in the rats’ auditory cortex whose activity especially was enhanced when the rats expect to hear the target compared to when that same target is presented, but at an unexpected moment.
In better understanding the neural circuits underlying attention, Zador may be paving the way for better understanding disorders like autism, which is, in large part, a disorder of neural circuits. The manifestation of the environmental and genetic causes of autism is a disruption of neural circuits and in particular, there is some reason to believe that it is a disruption of long-range neural circuits, at least in part, between the front of the brain and the back of the brain, those are the kinds of neural pathways that researchers think might be important in guiding attention. One of the ongoing projects in the lab is to examine a gene in mice that scientists think, when disrupted, cause autism in humans. Although the research is in preliminary stage, Zador is very optimistic that by understanding how autism affects these long range connections and how those long range connections in turn affect attention that we’ll gain some insight into what is going on in humans with autism.
Anthony, Z. (2008). Engaging in an auditory task suppresses responses in rat auditory cortex Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 2 DOI: 10.3389/conf.neuro.10.2008.01.100
Wehr M, & Zador AM (2003). Balanced inhibition underlies tuning and sharpens spike timing in auditory cortex. Nature, 426 (6965), 442-6 PMID: 14647382
Khalfa, S., Bruneau, N., Roge, B., Georgieff, N., Veuillet, E., Adrien, J., Barthelemy, C., & Collet, L. (2001). Peripheral auditory asymmetry in infantile autism European Journal of Neuroscience, 13 (3), 628-632 DOI: 10.1046/j.1460-9568.2001.01423.x
Wehr M, & Zador AM (2005). Synaptic mechanisms of forward suppression in rat auditory cortex. Neuron, 47 (3), 437-45 PMID: 16055066
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