Dr. Shaowen Bao gave a talk titled "Auditory Cortical Plasticity in Rodent Models of Developmental Brain Disorders and Aging" at 3:00 pm on October 30.
He is interested in auditory cortical plasticity. He found that in the auditory cortex, there was a neuronal distribution pattern to sense the tones with various frequencies. In the front of the brain, the neurons encoded high-frequency tones while in the back of the brain, the neurons mainly sensed the low-frequency tones. After training in an environment with a single frequency tone, the number of neurons which encoded this tone increased. It suggests that neurons in the auditory cortex are able to adapt to the changing environment. More interestingly, he found that in the aging mice, neurons could not distinguish between tones similar in frequency. However, after intensive auditory training, their capability to distinguish between tones improved to a level comparable to that in the adult mice. These results are likely to have significant impact on the research of human auditory function and brain plasticity.
