2024/10/21 by David Ricardo Quiroga‐Martinez, Gemma Fernández‐Rubio, Leonardo Bonetti +4 · 2 voices
Neuroscience · #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neuroscience and Music Perception #EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces
paper · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3002858
Vividly imagining a song or a melody is a skill that many people accomplish with relatively little effort. However, we are only beginning to understand how the brain represents, holds, and manipulates these musical "thoughts." Here, we decoded perceived and imagined melodies from magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain data (N = 71) to characterize their neural representation. We found that, during perception, auditory regions represent the sensory properties of individual sounds. In contrast, a widespread network including fronto-parietal cortex, hippocampus, basal nuclei, and sensorimotor regions hold the melody as an abstract unit during both perception and imagination. Furthermore, the mental manipulation of a melody systematically changes its neural representation, reflecting volitional control of auditory images. Our work sheds light on the nature and dynamics of auditory representations, informing future research on neural decoding of auditory imagination.