EMBARGO: 16th April, 2015, 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern/7pm UK
How Do We Hear Time Within Sound?
How does our auditory system represent time within a sound? A new study published in PLOS
Computational Biology investigates how temporal acoustic patterns can be represented by neural
activity within auditory cortex, a major hub within the brain for the perception of sound.
Dr. Daniel Bendor, from University College London, describes a novel way that neurons in auditory
cortex can encode temporal information, based on how their excitatory and inhibitory inputs get mixed
together.
Your car moves when you press the accelerator and stops when you step on the brakes. In much the
same way, a neuron’s activity depends on the excitation and inhibition it receives from other neurons.
But how these inputs combine together to make a neuron “go” or “stop” can also convey information.
Dr. Bendor describes how a neuron’s excitatory and inhibitory inputs can be used to encode the
temporal patterns within a sound. Varying the timing and strength of these inputs can produce either a
rate or temporal neural code, effectively switching the “language” used by the brain for describing the
temporal patterns within a sound.
Understanding how the brain generates these neural codes can lead to the development of state-ofthe-art neural prosthetic devices, more closely imitating the neural coding patterns normally used by
the brain.
Image Caption: Auditory cortex uses neural excitation and inhibition to encode temporal patterns in a
sound, like the rhythm produced from a melody.
Image Credit: Daniel Bendor
Image Link: http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bendor-16th-April.jpg
All works published in PLOS Computational Biology are Open Access, which means that all content is
immediately and freely available. Use this URL in your coverage to provide readers access to the
paper upon publication: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004197
Press-only preview: http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/pcbi.1004197-Ben.pdf
Contact: Daniel Bendor
Address: University College London
Experimental Psychology
26 Bedford Way
room 502
London, WC1H 0AP
Phone: +447826665675
Email: d.bendor@ucl.ac.uk
Citation: Bendor D (2015) The Role of Inhibition in a Computational Model of an Auditory Cortical
Neuron during the Encoding of Temporal Information. PLoS Comput Biol 11(4): e1004197.
doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004197
Funding: This work was supported by grants from Action on Hearing Loss [PA06] and the Capita
Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish,
or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
About PLOS Computational Biology
PLOS Computational Biology (www.ploscompbiol.org) features works of exceptional significance that
further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the application of computational
methods. All works published in PLOS Computational Biology are Open Access. All content is
immediately available and subject only to the condition that the original authorship and source are
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