Early visual cortex receives non-feedforward input from lateral and top-down connections (Muckli & Petro 2013 Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 23, 195-201. (doi:10.1016/j.conb.2013.01.020)), including long-range projections from auditory areas. Early visual cortex can code for high-level auditory information, with neural patterns representing natural sound stimulation (Vetter et al. 2014 Curr. Biol. 24, ...

Speech perception requires that sounds be transformed into speech-related objects with lexical and semantic meaning. It is unclear at what level in the auditory pathways this transformation emerges. Primary auditory cortex has been implicated in both representation of acoustic sound attributes and sound objects. While non-primary auditory cortex located on the posterolateral superior temporal g...

Accumulating evidence demonstrates that responses in auditory cortex to auditory consequences of self-generated actions are modified relative to the responses evoked by identical sounds generated by an external source. Such modifications have been suggested to occur through a corollary discharge sent from the motor system, although the exact neuroanatomical origin is unknown. Furthermore, since...

Auditory cortical columns have been studied for decades, but intracolumnar processing in auditory cortex is still poorly understood, relative to what is known about such processing in visual cortex and somatosensory cortex. While there are certainly striking similarities in cortical structure across the modalities, investigations of auditory cortex anatomy and synaptic physiology have also foun...

Microelectrode studies in nonhuman primates and other mammals have demonstrated that many neurons in auditory cortex are excited by pure tone stimulation only when the tone's frequency lies within a narrow range of the audible spectrum. However, the effects of auditory cortex lesions in animals and humans have been interpreted as evidence against the notion that neuronal frequency selectivity i...

BACKGROUND Hallucinations are perceptions in the absence of a corresponding external sensory stimulus. However, during auditory verbal hallucinations, activation of the primary auditory cortex has been described. AIMS The objective of this study was to investigate whether this activation of the auditory cortex contributes essentially to the character of hallucinations and attributes them to a...

In sensory systems, the thalamus has historically been considered a relay station. Neural representations of temporal modulations in the auditory system undergo considerable changes as they pass from the inferior colliculus (IC) to the auditory cortex. We sought to determine in awake primates the extent to which auditory thalamic neurons contribute to these transformations. We tested the tempor...

How does auditory cortex respond to silence? In this issue of Neuron, show that activity in macaque auditory cortex is highly structured even in the absence of sensory stimuli. These data reveal a close link between spontaneous neural activity and the functional organization of auditory cortex.

The human auditory cortex is the gateway to the most powerful and complex communication systems and yet relatively little is known about its functional organization as compared to the visual system. Several lines of evidence, predominantly from recent studies, indicate that sound recognition and sound localization are processed in two at least partially independent networks. Evidence from human...