ZATORRE ROBERT

Project status: closed

Robert Zatorre is Professor of Neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (the Neuro) at McGill University in Canada. He co-directs the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), a unique center at the international level for music cognitive[1] neuroscience.

HIS WORK

For around 40 years, Prof. Zatorre has been studying the brain mechanisms involved in music perception, becoming a leader in this field in the 1980s. His fundamental research has helped create a new discipline, auditory cognitive neuroscience, or how the brain processes auditory information. Over the years, this has led to breakthroughs explaining brain organization, structure and function during musical listening.

The left and right brains: complementary scores

In 1992, Prof. Zatorre made a major discovery: using brain imaging, he showed that the brain processes speech and pitch (sounds from low to high) in an asymmetric, complementary way. The left auditory brain is specialized in speech recognition, whereas the right auditory brain deciphers music. Since then, Prof. Zatorre has pursued his research to understand the mechanisms involved in this asymmetry with a multidisciplinary approach, and in 2020, his team put forward a theory that went much further.

This new research shows that the left and right brains are sensitive to different elements of sound. The left auditory brain works very fast to follow the rapid modulations in speech-related sound. This region interprets phonemes, the basic units of sound in language. Meanwhile, the right auditory brain works more slowly, analyzing sound frequencies more precisely. This specialization makes us sensitive to melody. According to Prof. Zatorre, the brain has developed two parallel and complementary abilities in each side of the brain to process the most relevant sound cues and decipher speech and music.

Progress for patients

Ultimately, Prof. Zatorre’s fundamental research will have many positive outcomes for deaf or hearing-impaired patients. In particular, he hopes it will lead to new-generation cochlear implants with improved transmission of sound modulations. The aim? To enable implanted persons to communicate better and enjoy again music.

Over his career, Prof. Zatorre and his team have explored numerous other questions linked to musical cognition, like the special aptitudes of musicians and the mechanisms for musical enjoyment. An understanding of the way the brain deciphers speech and music should help optimize hearing rehabilitation protocols for persons wearing hearing aids and implants, improving their perception of voice tone and speech in noisy environments.
For Prof. Zatorre, “a better understanding the way the brain processes music and how this differs from speech processing is crucial for improving musical perception with implants. This progress is very important since music is essential, given the emotions it generates! ”

In addition to the field of hearing loss, these discoveries interest clinicians treating depressive disorders, Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.

HIS CAREER

After undergraduate degrees in psychology and music at Boston University in the United States, Robert Zatorre opted to study experimental psychology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (United States). In 1978, determined to combine his scientific curiosity with his passion for music, he proposed a doctoral thesis in musical cognition, a poorly developed field of study at the time, to Dr. Peter Eimas. He obtained his PhD in experimental psychology from Brown University in 1981. For his postdoctoral research, Dr. Brenda Milner, a cognitive neuropsychology pioneer, opened the doors to her laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Quebec. In 1983, he obtained a neuropsychologist position and started building his reputation in the field of musical cognition, which he largely helped build. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1989 and then Tenured Professor in 2005, and received a research chair in Canada in 2020.
Proud of the international influence of the BRAMS Laboratory for music neuroscience founded in 2006 with his colleague Isabelle Peretz, Prof. Zatorre is pleased that “a new generation is pursuing this work worldwide, particularly in Europe and France.” Indeed, his former students and all the researchers he has inspired now form a network that, across the world and particularly in Europe and France, are keeping up the momentum in musical cognition.

Finally, Prof. Robert Zatorre’s international reputation has earned him numerous awards. These include the Oliver Sacks Award (Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, New York) in 2002, the IPSEN Foundation Prize for Neural Plasticity (Paris) in 2011, the Hugh Knowles Prize (Northwestern University, Chicago) in 2013, an elected membership to the Royal Society of Canada in 2017, the C.L. de Carvhalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences (the Alfred Heineken Fondsen Foundation and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) in 2020.