Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute & Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
Psychology Department, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
PLoS Biol. 2024 Oct 21;22(10):e3002858. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002858. eCollection 2024 Oct.
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.
生动地想象一首歌曲或旋律是许多人相对轻松就能完成的技能。然而，我们才刚刚开始了解大脑如何表示、保持和操纵这些音乐“思想”。在这里，我们从脑磁图（MEG）脑数据（N = 71）中解码感知和想象的旋律，以描述它们的神经表示。我们发现，在感知过程中，听觉区域表示单个声音的感觉特性。相比之下，一个包括额顶叶皮层、海马体、基底核和感觉运动区域的广泛网络在感知和想象过程中都将旋律作为一个抽象的单元。此外，旋律的心理操作会系统地改变其神经表示，反映出对听觉图像的意志控制。我们的工作揭示了听觉表示的性质和动态，为听觉想象的神经解码的未来研究提供了信息。
