Archivist in the sound library

The so-called ‘cocktail party-problem’ has already kept scientists busy for decades. How is it possible for the brain to filter familiar voices out of background noise? It is a long-standing hypothesis that we create a kind of sound library in the auditory cortex of the brain during the course of our lives. Professor Christian Leibold and Dr. Gonzalo Otazu at LMU Munich who are also members of the Bernstein Center Munich now show in a new model how the brain can compare stored and perceived sounds in a particularly efficient manner. Figuratively speaking, current models operate on the following principle: An archivist (possibly the brain region thalamus) compares the incoming sound with the individual entries in the library, and receives the degree of matching for each entry. Usually, however, several entries fit similarly well, so the archivist does not know which result is actually the right one.

The new model is different: as previously the archivist compares the sound with the library entries, this time getting back only a few really relevant records and information about how much the archived and heard elements differ. Therefore, only in the case of unknown or little matching inputs are large amounts of data sent back. “Perhaps this is also one reason why we can ignore known sounds better than new ones,” speculates Leibold, head of the study. During a test, the model was easily able to detect the sound of a violin and a grasshopper at the same time from 400 sounds with an overlapping frequency spectrum. Furthermore computational and memory requirements were significantly smaller than in comparable models. For the first time a library-based model allows a highly efficient real-time implementation, which is a prerequisite for an implementation in brain circuits.

Experiments long ago showed that a lot of information is sent from the cerebrum to the thalamus, so far without a universally accepted explanation. The new model predicts exactly this flow of information. “We quickly knew that our model works. But why and how, we had to find out laboriously,” Leibold says. Abstract mathematical models of neurobiological processes have the advantage that all contributing factors are known. Thus, one can show whether the model works well in a broad, biologically relevant, application-spectrum, as in this case. The researchers now want to incorporate their findings into other models that are more biologically detail-oriented, and finally test it in psychoacoustic experiments. (Faber/Bernstein Coordination Site)

The Bernstein Center Munich is part of the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience (NNCN) in Germany. The NNCN was established by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research with the aim of structurally interconnecting and developing German capacities in the new scientific discipline of computational neuroscience. The network is named after the German physiologist Julius Bernstein (1835–1917).

Information:
Bernstein Center Munich
www.bccn-muenchen.de

Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience
www.nncn.de

LMU Munich
www.en.uni-muenchen.de

Publication:
A corticothalamic circuit model for sound identification in complex scenes
Otazu G, Leibold C
PlosONE, 12 September 2011
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024270

Contact:
Prof. Christian Leibold
Department Biology II
LMU Munich
Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience
Phone: +49 89 2180 74802
E-mail: leibold@bio.lmu.de