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F. Rattay:
"Firing patterns in the auditory nerve";
Talk: Workshop, Max Planck Institut Göttingen (invited); 2015-07-02 - 2015-07-03.

Acoustical signals are represented in the auditory nerve both by place-rate information and by the fine structure of the time differences in the firing pattern. A third mechanism supports low energy signals and makes them audible using amplification by the Brownian motion of hair cell stereocilia. The theory shows that the possible recognition of this fine structure depends in a quadratic way on the number of the spiking elements, that is, the number of active afferent auditory nerve fibers. The number of firing elements seems to be of higher importance for speech understanding than a sharp tuning of frequency. The capture effects of neighbored characteristic frequencies enlarge the auditory nerve pattern. Furthermore, firing patterns of the electrically stimulated cochlea will be discussed.