Different sustained and induced alpha oscillations emerge in the human auditory cortex during sound processing

Abstract Alpha oscillations in the auditory cortex have been associated with attention and the suppression of irrelevant information. However, their anatomical organization and interaction with other neural processes remain unclear. Do alpha oscillations function as a local mechanism within most neural sources to regulate their internal excitation/inhibition balance, or do they belong to separated inhibitory sources gating information across the auditory network? To address this question, we acquired intracerebral electrophysiological recordings from epilepsy patients during rest and tones listening. Thanks to independent component analysis, we disentangled the different neural sources and labeled them as “oscillatory” if they presented strong alpha oscillations at rest, and/or “evoked” if they displayed a significant evoked response to the stimulation. Our results show that 1) sources are condition-specific and segregated in the auditory cortex, 2) both sources have a high-gamma response followed by an induced alpha suppression, 3) only oscillatory sources present a sustained alpha suppression during all the stimulation period. We hypothesize that there are two different alpha oscillations in the auditory cortex: an induced bottom-up response indicating a selective engagement of the primary cortex to process the stimuli, and a sustained suppression reflecting a general disinhibited state of the network to process sensory information.