Brain researchers are one step closer to knowing your deepest, darkest secrets. Eventually, neurologists may be able to scan your brain, uncovering those skeletons in your closet you often think and dream about, but never, ever talk about.
A new study from Universite de Montreal and the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University has revealed which part of the brain is the first to receive information when a sound is heard.
When a sensory system is activated by a stimulus – a touch, sound, scent, sight or flavour – messages are fired to specific areas of the brain, and then encoded. But, because the brain is such a complex organ, researchers have to take several steps before being able to crack the code.
The first step to learning the language of the brain, known as the neural code, is to find which part of the brain is the first to receive information from a stimulus.
"It’s like trying to read a language you don’t know," said Marc Schonwiesner, professor in the psychology department at Universite de Montreal. "We have to find what the symbols mean and translate them."
Schonwiesner said once neurologists are able to translate what happens in the brain, they will then be able to reconstruct the specific stimulus to which a person was subjected.
"It’s like preliminary mind reading," Schonwiesner said. "Down the road, we will be able to look at your brain activity and know you were listening to Beethoven, or to a man speak in French."
"Our goal is to disentangle exactly how the brain extracts these different types of sounds."
Tracking someone’s thoughts, and even dreams, through the files stored in their brain is in the distant future, Schonwiesner admitted. "But honestly, I never thought we would ever be able to record thoughts or dreams because it’s something that happens somewhere deep inside your brain," he said.
"Now I don’t think we’re all that far away."
For this study, researchers wanted to find out how the human brain makes a distinction between different sounds, such as music, a person speaking or a dog barking.
Test subjects’ brains were mapped using non-invasive functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine how their brains reacted to and recognized different characteristics in a musical instrument, a human voice or an animal’s call.
Schonwiesner and his colleagues found the brain uses the same strategy to encode sounds as it does for visual stimuli, an area that has already been researched heavily.
The next step, Schonwiesner said, is to determine how the brain distinguishes between classical and rock music, or a conversation in French and one in English.
"Once we reach that, we can probably reconstruct which song a person was listening to based on the activity in their brain," he said.
"When we can do that, then we’re just a baby step away from reconstructing dreams by recording someone’s brain pattern while they sleep."
A more immediate implication of this advancement – and one that sounds less like science fiction – is a potential ability to correct hearing disorders caused by neurological damage.
"This is a quickly advancing field with a lot of potential," Schonwiesner said. "Decoding information in the brain will lead us to know what intentions someone had, or what they were thinking, hearing or looking at."
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