What I got from this 2014 human study is that from the beginnings of our lives, we are attuned to perceive what our brains predict will be rewarding.
The subjects’ whole brains were monitored, but only areas of the cerebrum participated in the findings to a significant degree.
“Sounds associated with high rewards increase the sensitivity of vision.
The same neurons that process sensory information are modulated by reward..and thereby influence perception from the earliest stages of cortical processing.
Reward associations modulated responses in regions associated with multisensory processing in which the strength of modulation was a better predictor of the magnitude of the behavioral effect than the modulation in classical reward regions.”
Sounds a little bit like we all might have a mild case of synesthesia.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15244.full “Cross-modal effects of value on perceptual acuity and stimulus encoding”