Reviews & Analysis

This perpective offers an evolutionary perspective on the advantages of binaural hearing, and discusses the many different strategies for such hearing that animals have evolved. Authors discuss how these strategies might inform future work on auditory prosthetics.

Primary auditory cortex is usually thought to be directly analogous to primary visual cortex, with stimulus physical properties being represented at this level. This perspective argues that the auditory system has unique operating principles that make it different from the visual system, such as considerably greater subcortical processing.

In this perspective, the authors discuss recent advances in the development of cochlear implants and elucidate the implications of implant-induced plasticity for future technology.

Whereas birds can generate new auditory neurons even in adulthood, mammals cannot. This perspective suggests that factors such as increasing life span expose a deficit in cochlear self-regeneration that was irrelevant for most of mammalian evolution, resulting in hearing loss. Authors discuss various approaches aimed at regenerating hair cells to ameliorate such hearing loss.

This perspective illustrates some of the problems involved in analyzing the complex data yielded by systems neuroscience techniques, such as brain imaging and electrophysiology. Specifically, when test statistics are not independent of the selection criteria, common analyses can produce spurious results. The authors suggest ways to avoid such errors.