Neuroimaging Reveals Who Said What

What if someone could read your mind? Or more specifically, look at your brain and decipher who spoke to you and what was said? In an article found in Science, researchers worked with neuroimaging to map brain activity in response to sounds and voices. They stated that voices can be recognized by unique neural fingerprints in the brain of the listener. Eventually, advances in this area could improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition.

The vowel sounds of a, i , and u were spoken by three different people to seven volunteers. Functional MRI (fMRI) measured brain activity of the test subjects and an algorithm was developed in order to interpret the activity into relationships that could determine identity of the voice. It was concluded that certain acoustic characteristics of vocal cord vibrations or neural patterns, which are unique and specific, determined brain activity. The neural fingerprints did not change even if the speaker said something else.

Their research also found that areas of the brain just thought to be linked to early stages of sound processing also took part in complex sound decoding. It was previously assumed that after the brain processed simple speech sounds, it then analyzed the sounds into words in very specialized areas. After this study was conducted, it was revealed that speech processing is more evenly spread out across the brain.

This study foreshadows the possibilities that can unfold with more understanding and mapping of the brain, which is especially thrilling for bioengineers.

NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) (2008, November 10). Neuroimaging Of Brain Shows Who Spoke To A Person And What Was Said. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 11, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/11/081110071240.htm