Music Therapy Today - World Federation of Music Therapy

Brain Reader Part 2: As we age, our brains start to pay too much attention to
that all the volunteers heard them at the same level, irrelevant of the qual-
ity their hearing.
"The tones come in trains of fives, so that you have basically beep beep
beep beep beep and then there is a pause," explains Fabiani.
The researchers took two different measurements of brain activity -- both
EROS and a measurement of electrical activity in the brain.
Both techniques produced similar brain activity patterns -- volunteers in
their twenties only responded to the first tone in each sequence and then
ignored the rest, but the older adults' brains responded to all five of the
tones. "And so presumably that might have an influence on their reading,
and on their performance of their main task," Fabiani says.
With EROS, the researchers could also see which regions of the older
adults' brains kept responding to the sounds.
Fabiani describes the electrical measurements as being diffused over the
cortex. EROS, on the other hand, allowed them to see where in the brain
activity occured - in this case, in the auditory cortex.
Without EROS, she says, "We would not have the information that there
are clear patterns of this type in auditory cortex, we would know that
there are responses of this type, but we wouldn't be sure where they are
coming from."
It might seem intuitive to guess that the patterns would be found in the
auditory cortex, since the responses are directly related to hearing, but
Odds and ends - themes and trends 457