How Voices Tickle the Dog Brain

As a reporter I spend a lot of time analyzing voices, and I’m often amazed by how much a voice can convey that written words cannot. Sure, you can write down (as I did in a transcribing session yesterday) that a woman said, “He never responded to me.” But that quote doesn’t tell you whether she was apathetic, or annoyed, or profoundly disappointed. It doesn’t tell you what part of the country she’s from, or how old she is, or if she smokes, or how much she trusts you.A voice gives you all of that in just a few seconds. How do our brains make sense of this rich vocal stream, and so quickly? In 2000, scientists scanned people’s brains and discovered a piece of neural real estate that’s dedicated to the task: a spot above the ear that responds to vocal sounds more strongly than other types of sounds.This result was intriguing partly because the neuroscience world was buzzing about the specificity of other brain areas, notes Pascal Belin, a neuroscientist at the University of Glasgow and the lead author of the 2000 voice study. Just a few years earlier, another group had shown that a region in the visual cortex, the fusiform face area, is tuned to faces. These studies posed obvious evolutionary questions, Belin says. “These voice regions respond to speech and non-speech. So, are they uniquely human, or not?”Read more at...Only Human, February 2014.