Montreal Neurological Institute
Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D.
The Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
The Auditory Processing Laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute is concerned with basic research to achieve a better understanding of the cerebral basis for complex auditory processes. Several different lines of research are underway aimed at exploring how the human brain allows us to perceive, understand, remember and imagine sounds. In particular, our lab is most concerned with the two most complex and characteristically human uses of sound: speech and music.
This work covers a wide range of methodologies, including psychophysical and cognitive tests in healthy listeners, behavioral measures in focally brain-damaged individuals, functional brain imaging (positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging), and structural brain imaging and morphometry.
Current research is aimed at several different problems concerning the neural bases for:
Auditory spatial processing, including spatial localization and attention |
Perception and memory for pitch and melodic patterns |
Absolute pitch |
Imagery for music |
Emotion and music |
Speech processing |
Language organization in multilinguals |
Sign-language processing in the deaf |
Voice perception |
Spectral/temporal trade-off |
Morphometry of auditory structures in the human brain |
Morphometry of the corpus callosum |
Anatomical measures and their relation to language lateralization |
Profile
Neuropsychologist Robert Zatorre: Probing the musical mind
MUSICAL NEURONS
More than 30 years ago, Dr. Wilder Penfield saw that he could elicit musical and vocal "sounds" in the minds of his brain-surgery patients by electrically stimulating the brain's cortex. For the last several years, a researcher in the MNI's Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, Dr. Robert Zatorre, has been testing subjects with positron emission tomography to pinpoint the specific areas of the brain which process music. Why do some people distinguish musical notes better than others? Are people born with the ability to identify any note - perfect pitch - or do they somehow acquire it? Perfect pitch involves more than one part of the brain, believes Dr. Zatorre, but his research suggests that the brain's left hemisphere is particularly involved. Interestingly, this is the same hemisphere that is largely responsible for verbal skills. Dr. Zatorre believes too that some people have a predisposition toward perfect pitch and that this predisposition can be developed through musical studies. But if they wait too long, the chance to acquire perfect pitch is lost. Even amongst musicians, perfect pitch is found among just 3% of them at best. Dr. Zatorre - an organist without perfect pitch - notes that perfect pitch is a musical ability which most of the world's greatest musicians do not have.
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