Sensory Perception is Not Superficial Brain Work
martyb writes in with the following story via IRC:
Sensory perception is not superficial brain work:
If we cross a road with our smartphone in view, a car horn or engine noise will startle us. In everyday life we can easily combine information from different senses and shift our attention from one sensory input to another -- for example, from seeing to hearing. But how does the brain decide which of the two senses it will focus attention on when the two interact? And, are these mechanisms reflected in the structure of the brain?
To answer these questions, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and the Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre at the University of Birmingham measured how sensory stimuli are processed in the brain. In contrast to previous studies, they did not restrict their observations to the surface the cerebral cortex. For the first time, they also measured the sensory signals at different depths in the cortex. The researchers' findings suggest that our brains conduct the multi-sensory flow of information via distinct circuits right down to the smallest windings of this highly folded brain structure.
[...] The results showed that when participants heard a sound, visual areas of their brains were largely switched off. This happened regardless of whether they focused on the audible or visible aspect of the stimuli. However, if they strongly attended to the auditory input, brain activity decreased, particularly in the regions representing the center of the visual field. Thus, it seems that sound can strongly draw our attention away from what we're looking at.
Remi Gau, Pierre-Louis Bazin, Robert Trampel, Robert Turner, Uta Noppeney. Resolving multisensory and attentional influences across cortical depth in sensory cortices, eLife (DOI: doi:10.7554/eLife.46856)
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