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If there’s one thing Bevil Conway has learned from studying the visual cortices of rhesus macaques, it’s that they’re remarkably like those of humans. The visual cortex is anatomically highly similar in the two species, and macaques and humans show comparable behavioral and neural responses to colors and images. When a macaque opens its eyes, “I’m pretty sure he’s seeing what I’m seeing,” says Conway, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. But does the same hold true for what he hears?
The question came up in 2014 over a beer with Sam Norman-Haignere, then a graduate student with Josh McDermott and Nancy Kanwisher at MIT, where Conway headed a lab at the time. Norman-Haignere told Conway about his groups’ recent collaborative finding that a particular patch of the human auditory cortex is more sensitive to harmonic tones—notes that have an ...
