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Sound of silence activates auditory cortex

Abstract

Auditory imagery occurs when one mentally rehearses telephone numbers or has a song ‘on the brain’ — it is the subjective experience of hearing in the absence of auditory stimulation, and is useful for investigating aspects of human cognition1. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and characterize the neural substrates that support unprompted auditory imagery and find that auditory and visual imagery seem to obey similar basic neural principles.

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Figure 1: Auditory cortex activation during silent gaps in music.

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Correspondence to William M. Kelley.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Methods

Description of the subjects, materials, experimental design, data acquisition parameters, and data analyses. Includes a figure of the experimental design and a graph of signal change for the audible portions of familiar and unknown songs. (PDF 276 kb)

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Kraemer, D., Macrae, C., Green, A. et al. Sound of silence activates auditory cortex. Nature 434, 158 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/434158a

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