Cooperative dynamics in auditory brain response

Abstract

Simultaneous estimates of the activity in the left and right auditory cortex of five normal human subjects were extracted from Multichannel Magnetoencephalography recordings. Left, right and binaural stimulation were used, in separate runs, for each subject. The resulting time-series of left and right auditory cortex activity were analysed using the concept of mutual information. The analysis constitutes an objective method to address the nature of inter-hemispheric correlations in response to auditory stimulations. The results provide a clear evidence for the occurrence of such correlations mediated by a direct information transport, with clear laterality effects: as a rule, the contralateral hemisphere leads by 10-20ms, as can be seen in the average signal. The strength of the inter-hemispheric coupling, which cannot be extracted from the average data, is found to be highly variable from subject to subject, but remarkably stable for each subject.