Nina Kraus is a professor at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

, investigating the neural encoding of speech and music and its plasticity where she is the

Hugh S. Knowles Hugh S. Knowles (September 23, 1904 in Hynes Iowa – April 22, 1988) was an American acoustical engineer, inventor, and manufacturer in the hearing aids field. He was the holder of more than 50 patents in acoustics and related fields. In 1946, ...

Chair. Her Auditory Neuroscience Lab, also known as Brainvolts, examines the biological processing of

sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

throughout the life span, how it is disrupted in clinical populations ( language disorders;

concussion A concussion, also known as a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), is a head injury that temporarily affects brain functioning. Symptoms may include loss of consciousness (LOC); memory loss; headaches; difficulty with thinking, concentration, ...

), and how it reacts to differing levels of expertise (

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

;

bilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

). Her work has shown that the hearing brain is vast—engaging our cognitive, sensory, motor, and reward networks. This perspective is illustrated in her book ''Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World''. Investigations are aimed at improving

human communication Human communication, or anthroposemiotics, is a field of study dedicated to understanding how humans Communication, communicate. Humans ability to communicate with one another would not be possible without an understanding of what we are refere ...

. Kraus’ work is rooted in a desire to bring scientific understanding into educational and clinical settings.

Book

* Kraus, N. (2021). ''Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World''. MIT Press.

References

External links

Brainvolts Lab website
American music psychologists Northwestern University faculty American neuroscientists American women neuroscientists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics 21st-century American women {{US-academic-bio-stub