WHO: Carles Escera (Brainlab-Grup de Recerca en Neurociència Cognitiva, Institut de Neurociències, UB, Artsoundscapes Senior Staff)
We as humans are a social species that rely very much on our communication capacities to organize our life activities and ensure survival. And human communication capitalizes on the brain’s ability to deal with sound through the powerful machinery of auditory system to extract speech-sound patterns and intrinsic rhythm and melody in musical flows. These speech-sound patterns and intrinsic rhythmicities and melodies are encoded in distributed and partially overlapped but segregated cerebral networks that span the whole cerebral cortex (and also non-cortical structures). In this talk, I will present a short overview of the auditory system’s structural organization and dynamics to highlight some of its basic functional principles, and will make the case for analyzing patterns on neuroelectric brain activity through the recording of the electroencephalogram (EEG) to identify mental states induced by particular soundscapes, such as those found in sacred landscapes featuring rock art.