Why is the Auditory System so Complex?
February 5, 1999 (Friday) – 4:00 pm Professor George D. Pollak,Section of Neurobiology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin http://www.biosci.utexas.edu/ In this talk I will address the issue of why there are so many parallel pathways in the ascending auditory system and what functional role they may be playing in audition. The multiple pathways can be divided into 2 principal types: binaural pathways that merge information from the two ears and monaural pathways that segregate information from the two ears. There are several binaural and several monaural pathways but all of them converge upon a common target in the inferior colliculus, the principal auditory nucleus in the midbrain. I address the roles these pathways play by focusing on how these pathways code for and represent interaural intensity disparities (IIDs), the cue that animals use to localize high frequency sounds. The main point of the talk is that the complexities of these pathways seem not t
