Article
Sensory processing of sound - out of the box and in sync with current ideas (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Processing of sound by the auditory system enables communication, also in acoustically highly complex situations. Any damage to the system leads to a degradation in the ability to detect and separate individual sounds. The ability to process sound is commonly quantified and modeled using a broad variety of methods including listening tests, signal processing models, and electrophysiological measures of neural activity. This combination of efforts lead to numerous insights into the function of the auditory system, and supported the development of diagnostic methods and hearing-assistive devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants.The increasing amount of novel insights form physiology, and the desire to detect and treat hearing impairment earlier and more efficiently exposes intrinsic challenges of current approaches to accommodate these challenges. This study presents a complementary approach to investigate sensory information processing in physiological systems. We used systems of coupled nonlinear oscillators to investigate the impact of nonlinear properties of dynamical systems on information processing. Such systems can be regarded as prototype models of both the inner ear and the neural system from which common functions like bandpass filtering, compression and amplification can be derived. Recent knowledge from network medicine are discussed in the light of hearing.