ARNAL Luc

institut de l'AUDITION 2019

Project status: active

In both humans and animals, auditory communication plays an essential role in the ability to share information remotely and react in an appropriate and concerted manner. Any loss or deterioration in this essential sensory function has a dramatic impact on our mental health and social lives. The “Auditory Cognition and Communication Lab” team directed by Luc Arnal and Diane Lazard want to improve our understanding of the brain processes that process complex communications signals, whether verbal, non-verbal or musical, and trigger suitable behavioral responses.

2020 Early Career Scientific Prize 

Project status: closed

Luc Arnal has been awarded the 2020 Early Career Scientific Prize for Fundamental Research in recognition of his particularly original interdisciplinary research on non-classical auditory pathways. By revealing the existence of these pathways, he offers a new vision of the workings of the auditory system.                                                                                                    

Luc Arnal is a Researcher at the Pasteur Institute and, with Diane Lazard, Co-Director of the Auditory Cognition and Communication Lab [KM1] (ACCLab) at the Hearing Institute in Paris. His group is studying the networks that carry sound to the brain, the way sounds are processed and the behavioral reactions caused by them. To do so, the researchers are using leading-edge psychoacoustic, brain imaging and digital modeling methods.

CAREER

Luc Arnal completed his doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at the laboratory of Professor Anne-Lise Giraud at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Then, in 2010, he embarked on postdoctoral studies at the laboratory of David Poeppel at New York University. During this research, he won acclaim for providing the first-ever experimental proof of the predictive coding theory in the multisensory context, by which the perception of sound is not passive but based on the brain anticipating future events. The young researcher then took an innovative approach to understanding the complexity of the auditory system, focusing on the mechanisms for perceiving unpleasant sounds and the reactions provoked by them. In 2014, upon returning to Professor Giraud’s laboratory, moved to the University of Geneva, he pursued this topic. In 2016, he was appointed a Teaching Assistant, then in 2019, he became a researcher at the Pasteur Institute and joined the Hearing Institute, where he created his own team.

RESEARCH

In recent years, Luc Arnal has discovered that certain “rough” or unpleasant sounds, emitted at particular frequencies, are processed by the brain differently to language: in addition to classical hearing pathways, they take a non-classical route to the archaic areas of the brain involved in emotions, pain and reactions to danger. This is the case for the cries of babies, human screams and alarm sounds, which lead us to react quickly in auditory aversion. Notably, this discovery explains the excessive reaction of parents in shaken baby syndrome.

Luc Arnal is now aiming to transfer his fundamental discoveries to a clinical setting to understand, and eventually treat, tinnitus, noise hypersensitivity, hearing loss and the inappropriate cerebral and emotional responses to certain sounds observed in Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Doctor Luc Arnal
Investigator - Team leader
Institut de l’Audition, Paris, France

Related scientific publication(s):

• Timothée Proix, Jaime Delgado Saa, Andy Christen, Stephanie Martin, Brian N Pasley, Robert T Knight , Xing Tian, David Poeppel, Werner K Doyle, Orrin Devinsky , Luc H Arna, Pierre Mégevand, Anne-Lise Giraud. Imagined speech can be decoded from low- and cross-frequency intracranial EEG features. Nat Commun. 2022 Jan 10;13(1):48. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27725-3.