Summary
the 2014 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications
2014
Session Number:D1L-A
Session:
Number:D1L-A5
Power-Laws and Loss of Power-Laws in the Tuned Cochlea
Florian Gomez, Tom Lorimer, Ruedi Stoop,
pp.656-659
Publication Date:2014/9/14
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
The mammalian cochlea is a sophisticated hearing sensor that uses active amplification to enhance weak sounds. The nonlinearity necessary for this task allows a remarkable dynamic range, yet at the same time it removes the superposition principle, resulting in complex interactions of the incoming frequencies and the generation of new frequencies (combination tones). Using a biophysically realistic mesoscopic model of the cochlea, we show that the processing of sound mixtures produces activity profiles consistent with power-laws. Importantly, if the cochlea is parameter-tuned in a way that was earlier shown to effectively model the process of active listening, the power-law distribution is broken.