Patients undergoing epilepsy surgery often have electrodes placed directly on or in the brain to locate their seizures. With their participation in research, these recordings give us a rare, millisecond-by-millisecond view of how the human brain hears. We use this window to ask how we recognize voices, make sense of sound, and how these abilities develop as children grow.
How the brain recognizes voice
Voices tell us who is speaking and how they feel. Recording directly from the human brain, we study how auditory cortex recognizes voices in a fraction of a second, and how it tracks how voice-like a sound is along a continuous scale.
From sound to meaning: the auditory ventral stream
Sound is transformed step by step as it moves through the brain. We record from early and higher-order auditory areas to follow how raw sound becomes meaningful categories like speaker, word, and emotion, moment by moment.
How the listening brain matures
Because our patients range from young children to adults, we can study how auditory networks for speech and voice mature. We test whether auditory critical periods extend well beyond their traditional timeframes, and how epilepsy may affect this.