Re: pitch neurons

[Martin Braun <nombraun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Israel Nelken wrote:

> All in all, I think that the cautious position at the moment is still
> that there is no unequivocal evidence for pitch sensitivity up to and
> including the level of primary auditory cortex in animals, independent
> of the spectral content of the sounds.

Dear Eli and List,

There is no reason to assume that other mammals have different pitch
mechanisms than humans. For humans we have now compelling data that exclude
the view that pitch is first extracted in the auditory cortex:

Fishman YI, Volkov IO, Noh MD, Garell PC, Bakken H, Arezzo JC, Howard MA,
Steinschneider M (2001) Consonance and dissonance of musical chords: neural
correlates in auditory cortex of monkeys and humans. J Neurophysiol
86:2761-88.

The authors did not discuss the location of pitch extraction in this paper.
They focused on the consonance issue. But in seven of their figures the
data show that pitch of harmonic complex tones must be extracted below the
primary auditory cortex. I pointed this out in a comment about the paper on
my website, for which Yon Fishman was very grateful:

http://hem.netlink.se/~sbe29751/Fishman.htm

Martin

-------------------------------------------
Martin Braun
Neuroscience of Music
S-671 95 Klässbol
Sweden
e-mail: nombraun@post.netlink.se
web site: http://hem.netlink.se/~sbe29751/home.htm