Lockwood explains how brain responds to sound.
'UB at Sunrise' audience hears neurology professor lecture on 'Listening with Your Brain'

By LOIS BAKER
News Services Editor

Alan Lockwood, professor of neurology and director of operations at the UB/Veterans Affairs Medical Center's Center for Positron Emission Tomography (PET), discussed how the brain responds to various sounds in a March 3 "UB at Sunrise" presentation titled "Listening With Your Brain."

A specialist in the brain-imaging technique of positron emission tomography, Lockwood is conducting some of the newest studies on the links between the human auditory system and the brain. His research has shown heretofore unknown connections between the sites in the brain that register sound and those that control emotion. Currently, he is co-principal researcher on a $1.5 million grant using PET imaging to investigate hearing loss and tinnitus, the sometimes incapacitating "ringing in the ears" experienced by about 10 percent of elderly people.

PET scans can register blood flow in the brain, and because blood flow increases in the part of the brain where work is being accomplished, researchers can track the brain regions activated by a specific task.

To make his point that hearing involves much more than sound reaching the ears, Lockwood employed some of those brain scans as illustrations. He compared the brain's response to silence and to a noisy environment, and then guided the audience through a series of scans taken while study participants performed mental tasks requiring varying degrees of attentiveness.

He was able to show how brain activity increased and more regions became involved as a task progressed from passive listening to syllables, to responding to a target syllable, to identifying specific spoken words, to picking out words from cocktail-party-like chatter.

He also demonstrated that grammatical tasks activate different areas of the brain in men and women, that aging brains respond differently than young brains and that sounds received by the right and left ears activate different brain regions