“Iceberg Ahead! - Neural Mechanisms of Interaural Time Processing in the Lateral Lemniscus”

Neural sensitivity to micro-second differences in the ongoing temporal structure of sounds at the two ears underlies our sense of auditory space. This sensitivity first emerges in specialized neurons in the medial superior olive (MSO) through a process of coincidence detection. MSO principal neurons’ axons project in the lateral lemniscus to target neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) and dorsal nucleus of the lateral lemniscus (DNLL). These neurons integrate other inputs with those from the MSO to further process acoustic spatial cues. In this talk I will present in-vivo intra-cellular electrophysiological data from labeled neurons in the DNLL. Our data reveal a novel cellular mechanism for shaping interaural-correlation sensitivity: we term it the “iceberg” effect.