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. 2016 Dec 15:6:39236.
doi: 10.1038/srep39236.

A window into the brain mechanisms associated with noise sensitivity

Marina Kliuchko  1   2 , Marja Heinonen-Guzejev  3 , Peter Vuust  4 , Mari Tervaniemi  1   5 , Elvira Brattico  4
Affiliations

A window into the brain mechanisms associated with noise sensitivity

Marina Kliuchko et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Noise sensitive individuals are more likely to experience negative emotions from unwanted sounds and they show greater susceptibility to adverse effects of noise on health. Noise sensitivity does not originate from dysfunctions of the peripheral auditory system, and it is thus far unknown whether and how it relates to abnormalities of auditory processing in the central nervous system. We conducted a combined electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography (M/EEG) study to measure neural sound feature processing in the central auditory system in relation to the individual noise sensitivity. Our results show that high noise sensitivity is associated with altered sound feature encoding and attenuated discrimination of sound noisiness in the auditory cortex. This finding makes a step towards objective measures of noise sensitivity instead of self-evaluation questionnaires and the development of strategies to prevent negative effects of noise on the susceptible population.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Experimental stimuli.
The first row illustrates a piano tone sequence organized in patterns of four, where the third tone is a deviant (thin outline) and the other three are standards (thick outline). The presentation of deviant types was randomized. The dotted lines represent frequencies that correspond to notes of a tonic chord. The key was changed periodically in a pseudo-random order. Each tone was 200 ms in duration with an interstimulus interval (ISI) of 5 ms. The rows below represent an example sound waveform (upper) and a spectrogram (lower) of a standard and deviants. The thick black lines on the spectrograms represent the base frequency.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Group-averaged ERPs and difference waveforms.
ERPs to the standard stimuli are on the left and the difference waveforms obtained by subtracting the ERP to the standard from the ERP to the noise deviant are on the right. P1 and MMN waveforms are indicated on the figure. NS = noise sensitivity.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Mean amplitudes of magnetic MMN to the noise deviant in low, medium and high NS groups across all ROIs.
The asterisk indicates a significant difference (P = 0.007). NS = noise sensitivity.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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