Voice-Task covered by the New York Times finds clinical application at HUG

a child listening to its own voice through a cup and string phone

Everyone is familiar with the strangeness our own voice has when we hear it in a recording. While this is generally considered an innocuous effect, recent research suggests that investigating this otherness may in fact be critical for understanding the role of our own voice for our sense-of-self; a topic of direct clinical impact and subject of on-going studies at the HUG Neurocentre.

In their article published in RSOS on February 15^th and covered in the New York Times, Pavo Orepic PhD at Geneva University, Oliver Kannape, PhD, Director of the Centre for Virtual Medicine, and Pr Olaf Blanke (EPFL) for the first time provide direct evidence of how the perception of our own voice depends on bone-conduction signals. That is, the vibrations, created while talking and directly transferred via our facial bones and thus perceived as part of our voice.
In a series of studies, the researchers “found that sending a recording through the facial bones made it easier for people to tell their voices apart from those of strangers, suggesting that this technology provides a better way to study how we can tell when we are speaking.” Clinically, this may present an “important step in understanding the origins of hallucinated voices”.

How does this translate to clinical work at HUG and the NeuroCentre?

Indeed, as highlighted in the New York Times piece, this novel approach “opens a door to understanding how one’s brain takes this sensory information and turns it into a recognition of one’s self”.

In a collaborative study conducted at the Swiss Foundation for Innovation and Training in Surgery (SFITS) and published in 2022, Giannarita Ianotti, PhD and NeuroCentre coordinator, and Pr Karl Schaller, Head of Division of Clinical Neurosciences and Director of the NeuroCentre, along with Pavo Orepic, adapted the task to map “the neural activity of people performing these listening tasks and reported the existence of a network of brain regions that are activated as people work to identify themselves”.

An on-going study at the HUG Neurocenter is now evaluating this task, and network, as a tool for managing the prediction of the impact of neurosurgery on the patient’s sense-of-self to inform clinical decision-making. As such it underscores the importance of translating state-of-the-art research into clinical practice.
This work is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant no 182497 to Prof Schaller “Mapping the brain networks of the bodily and cognitive self for the prediction of personality deficits following brain surgery”.

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Voice-Task covered by the New York Times finds clinical application at HUG

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