Cellular Mechanisms for Information Coding in Auditory Brainstem Nuclei

The brainstem auditory nuclei carry out a wide variety of transformations of the signals carried by the auditory nerve. Although basic frequency and intensity information is first encoded in the cochlea, brainstem circuitry must perform further neural definitions and refinements of these parameters, as well as integrate the cues necessary for the localization of sounds in space. Each of these aspects is associated not just with certain cell types, morphologies, and synaptic connections, but with cells having characteristic electrical response profiles. Such response properties are an outcome of the complement of ion channels that the cells possess and of the dynamic properties of the synapses through which cells communicate.