A single auditory nerve fibre’s firing is unpredictable and noisy

Evidence

The functionality of an auditory fibre has a stochastic nature; one cannot accurately predict when the fibre fires. Therefore, the signal from a single auditory fibre contains somewhat noisy data, and the outputs of large numbers of fibres need to be combined to form the pure and clean sensation that a normal functional auditory system produces. In simple functional models, the combined functionality of inner hair cells and nerve fibres can be emulated deterministically with half-wave rectification and low-pass filtering. However, the stochastic nature of the nerve-fibre firing may be simulated more accurately with a probabilistic model of the inner hair cell and auditory nerve complex. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1639

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Clean auditory sensation emerges only from pooling many noisy nerve fibres — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1639; Auditory nerve firing is stochastic, requiring many fibres pooled.; Loudness cannot be explained by single auditory nerve fiber firing alone — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 731 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Auditory nerve firing is stochastic, requiring many fibres pooled. #corroborates (0.90)
• Loudness cannot be explained by single auditory nerve fiber firing alone #expands (0.85) — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 731
• The auditory system’s ~120 dB dynamic range exceeds any single nerve fiber’s coding capacity #qualifies (0.80) — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 732