Comparative Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory
Head of laboratory:
The Comparative Auditory Neuroscience laboratory is broadly interested in the evolution of sensory processing. How did the sensory and nervous systems of animals evolve within the context of their environment? What is the system capable of and how did it arrive there? How do different evolutionary solutions to the same problem compare and what can we learn from this with respect to human functions, both normal and diseased?
Our model for studying these basic questions is the auditory system of vertebrates. We are interested in the sensory elements of the inner ear as well as the first stages of neural processing of auditory stimuli.
Currently, we are mainly working with birds. Their hearing organ, the basilar papilla, shows striking parallels to the mammalian cochlea, most importantly in the specialization of different types of sensory cells, the hair cells. Birds are also providing profound insights into the basic mechanism of auditory processing in the brain. A famous example is the barn owl, a nocturnal bird, able to locate its prey in complete darkness by passive acoustic localization, i.e. listening to prey noises. This extraordinary ability makes the owl an important animal model for the neural mechanisms of sound localization. Many features of the barn owl hearing system are special or exaggerated, e.g. the characteristic facial ruff (a sophisticated device for amplifying and channeling sound), the very large inner ear with extended high-frequency representation, and the hypertrophied auditory brain centres.
Specific projects we are currently interested in:
- Neural coding of interaural time differences, a crucial cue used in sound localization, in the avian brainstem
- Development of the barn owl cochlea
- Evolution of the cochlear efferent system, providing an influence of the brain on the transduction and neural coding of auditory stimuli
