[Source:  Medical News Today]
Imagine the brain’s delight when experiencing the sounds of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” while simultaneously taking in a light show produced by a visualizer.
A new Northwestern University study did much more than that.
To understand how the brain responds to highly complex auditory-visual stimuli like music and moving images, the study tracked parts of the auditory system involved in the perceptual processing of “Moonlight Sonata” while it was synchronized with the light show made by the iTunes Jelly visualizer.
The study shows how and when the auditory system encodes auditory-visual synchrony between complex and changing sounds and images.
Much of related research looks at how the brain processes simple sounds and images. Locating a woodpecker in a tree, for example, is made easier when your brain combines the auditory (pecking) and visual (movement of the bird) streams and judges that they are synchronous. If they are, the brain decides that the two sensory inputs probably came from a single source.
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