Bat Brains Parse Sounds for Multitasking

ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2012) — Imagine listening to music while carrying on a conversation with friends. This type of multi-tasking is fairly easy to do, right? That's because our brains efficiently and effectively separate the auditory signals -- music to the right side; conversation to the left. But what researchers have not been able to do in humans or animals is to see a parsing of duties at the single neuron level -- until now.

Publishing in the European Journal of Neuroscience, bat researcher Jagmeet Kanwal, PhD, associate professor in the department of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center, reports on how and in which hemisphere of the brain, bats process incoming signals that allow them to orient and navigate while at the same time, make sense of what other bats are trying to tell them.

To understand auditory brain function, bats are especially interesting animals to study because they process sound through echolocation, which is a kind of biological sonar. Bats emit loud pulses and then listen to their own echoes produced when those pulses bounce off nearby objects. And while bats aren't blind, as is the common myth, they exclusively use echoes to navigate and to hunt while flying.

Read more at:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120103135504.htm