AUDITORY GROUP

Timothy David Griffiths

Positions:

Wellcome Senior Clinical Fellow

Professor of Cognitive Neurology, and Honorary Consultant Neurologist, Newcastle University Medical School, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Honorary Principal, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UCL)

Adjunct Professor, University of Iowa Medical School, USA

Research categories:

Neuroscience: Investigation of complex sound processing by the brain (‘The mind’s ear’)

Cognitive Neurology: Investigation of complex sound processing in brain disorders (including degenerative disorders like dementia, developmental disorders like autism ,and psychiatric disorders)

Work is supported by the Wellcome Trust (UK) and NIH (USA)

Website and reprints:

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/t.d.griffiths/tdg.html

Research summary:

Tim Griffiths has been a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow since 2000 (renewed 2010 for another 5 years). During tenure of Wellcome Training Fellowships (1995 – 2000) he received training in psychophysics in Newcastle, and training in functional neuoroimaging at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (WTCN). He has held substantive positions at both centres ever since.

His group studies brain bases for auditory perception and the impact of neurological disease on these. The group carries out psychophysical studies of neurological patients so as to precisely characterise the effects of brain disorder, as well as to infer normal mechanisms. More specifically, he has developed bottom-up approaches to auditory cognition requiring new ‘stochastic’ stimuli mimicking the natural acoustic world. This behavioural approach has led to discoveries in relation to developmental language disorders, disorders of musical perception, the effects of stroke, and the neural basis for sensory aberrations such as hallucinations. Parallel functional imaging experiments provide insights into the mechanisms for partitioning the acoustic world into objects with different properties. This latter work has informed an ongoing theoretical debate concerning the nature of auditory objects. Recently he has also started to carry out studies of patients with depth electrodes implanted into auditory cortex in collaboration with Matt Howard in Iowa, and to develop a primate model of auditory cognition using fMRI in Newcastle.

A focus of current work is computational modelling of imaging and depth-electrode data to identify precise cortical systems for auditory cognition that might be targeted by interventions. The likely translational impact of his work is now being realised by his extension of knowledge derived from his analysis of brain pitch mechanisms in normals to the study of tinnitus patients.

Key achievements: Neuroscience

1. Identification of cortical pitch analysis mechanisms [Nature Neurosci 1998, 2001 and 2002; PLoS Biol 2007; Curr Biol 2010].

2. Identification of cortical spatial analysis mechanisms [Nature 1996; Nature Neurosci 1998; Neuron 2002; SfN 2010].

3. Identification of cortical mechanisms for auditory object analysis [series of studies reviewed in ‘The Cognitive Neurosciences’ textbook 2009].

Key achievements: Cognitive Neurology

1. Development of batteries to assess auditory cognition in neurological patients [‘The Auditory Brain’ book, OUP 2009; timing battery in PNAS 2010 and timbre battery submitted]. Studies using these batteries are currently ongoing in centres in Europe and USA.

2. Developmental disorders. i) Identification of relationship between pitch-sequence analysis and reading ability relevant to dyslexia [Nature Neurosci 2003; SfN 2009] ii) Systematic psychoacoustic characterisation of congenital auditory agnosia [Brain 2004].

3. Hallucinations. i) Phenomenological and neural model for musical hallucinations [Brain 2000] ii) Identification of substrate for the perception of voices in space, relevant to auditory hallucinations [Brain 2003].

4. Training. He established the National ‘Practical Cognition Course’. 

The UCL Institute of Neurology promotes teaching and research of the highest quality in neurology and the neurosciences. The Institute of Neurology and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery are members of  UCL Partners, Europe's largest academic health science partnership.