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Hearing

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When we hear a sound, our nervous system is detecting sound waves—pressure waves of mechanical energy traveling through a medium. The frequency of the wave is perceived as pitch, while the amplitude is perceived as loudness.

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Auditory Pathway

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Auditory pathways constitute the complex neural circuits responsible for transmitting and interpreting auditory information from the peripheral auditory system to the brain. Sound waves are initially captured by the outer ear, funneled through the ear canal, and reach the tympanic membrane (eardrum). These vibrations are transmitted via the middle ear's ossicles to the inner ear's cochlea.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 11, 2026

A Large Lateral Craniotomy Procedure for Mesoscale Wide-field Optical Imaging of Brain Activity

A Large Lateral Craniotomy Procedure for Mesoscale Wide-field Optical Imaging of Brain Activity

Published on: May 7, 2017

Salient sounds activate human visual cortex automatically.

John J McDonald¹, Viola S Störmer, Antigona Martinez

¹Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|May 24, 2013

Summary

Sudden sounds automatically activate human visual cortex, even when irrelevant to the task. This cross-modal activation enhances visual processing and influences perceptual judgments.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Auditory-Visual Interaction

Background:

Salient sounds can improve visual perception, but the underlying neural mechanisms are not fully understood.
It remains unclear if sounds automatically engage the visual cortex, irrespective of task relevance.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether sudden sounds automatically activate human visual cortex.
To determine if this cross-modal activation is spatially specific.
To examine the relationship between sound-evoked brain activity and visual perception.

Main Methods:

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in response to peripheral sounds preceding visual targets or during auditory tasks.
Neural generators of sound-evoked ERPs were localized to the extrastriate visual cortex.
The amplitude of cross-modal ERPs was correlated with perceptual judgments of visual target contrast.

Main Results:

Peripheral sounds consistently elicited a contralateral ERP over the occipital scalp.
These ERPs originated from neural generators in the ventral occipital lobe's extrastriate visual cortex.
The amplitude of the sound-evoked visual ERP predicted performance on visual contrast detection tasks.

Conclusions:

Sudden, intrusive sounds reflexively activate human visual cortex in a spatially specific manner.
This automatic visual cortex activation occurs even during auditory-only tasks.
Sound-induced visual cortex activation plays a role in modulating visual perception.