Study of bats offers insight into how humans focus on certain sounds
In an effort to learn how humans focus on some sounds and filter out others, a researcher from Georgetown University Medical Center turned to the mustached bat.
While the visual processing part of the brain is large in humans, it is the auditory processing area that is large in bats.
"Humans operate predominantly by sight so a huge portion of our brain is devoted to vision processing. Bats, however, operate by sound," said Bridget Queenan, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Georgetown who worked on the bat study.
Bats process sound through echolocation -- screeching, then listening to the echoes as they bounce off other objects.
"What we are trying to figure out is how a bat can fly around echolocating -- screeching and listening to its own individual sounds bouncing back -- amidst a whole colony of hundreds of other echolocating bats -- and possibly hear another bat saying, 'Watch out!' " Queenan said, adding, "Bats actually do make these cautionary calls quite a bit."
In her study, Queenan and colleagues woke bats using different combinations of echolocation with various communication sounds and then examined how neurons in the bats' brains dealt with all of the sound. They learned that some of the bat neurons control other bat neurons when an important sound is detected. Other neurons seem to boost perception of bat communication in the midst of background noise.
The team's findings were presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.
Queenan said she now intends to record brain neurons in bats that are flying.
This Nature video shows how bats use echolocation to find bodies of water:
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