Lecture | Jennifer Groh | Hearing in a World of Light: Computations for Communicating Across the Senses

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

No sensory system is an island. The auditory and visual systems work together to provide information about the nature of the events occurring in the environment. I will talk about why they do this, where in the brain it happens, and how the brain performs the necessary computations to achieve it. I will emphasize the following general insights: 1. Interactions between sensory systems occur at the earliest possible point in the auditory pathway, namely, the eardrum. 2. The brain may employ a strategy akin to time-division multiplexing, in which neural activity fluctuates across time, to allow representations to represent more than one simultaneous stimulus. These findings speak to several general problems confronting modern neuroscience such as the hierarchical organization of brain pathways and limits on perceptual/cognitive processing.

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh