The Critical Thing About Hearing
Event Details
- Type
- Monday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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A. James Hudspeth, M.D., Ph.D., F.M. Kirby Professor and head, Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, The Rockefeller University; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Speaker bio(s)
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Uniquely among our sensory receptors, the ear's hair cells are not passive, but use an active process to enhance their inputs. This active process amplifies mechanical stimuli by a thousandfold and thus enhances sensitivity to weak sounds; when the process fails, we become hard of hearing. Frequency tuning restricts each hair cell's response to a narrow frequency band; if the active process deteriorates, we lose the ability to discriminate speech and other sound sources. The active process produces a compressive nonlinearity that renders the ear sensitive to sounds over a millionfold range of amplitude; by enhancing weak stimuli and suppressing strong ones, this feature allows us to enjoy a soloist as comfortably as a full orchestra hundreds of times as loud. Finally, the active process can be so exuberant as to become unstable; as a result, in a very quiet environment most normal ears spontaneously emit sound! The active process stems from a general principle: operation of hair cells as "critical oscillators," that is, as active dynamical systems poised near a particular oscillatory instability called a Hopf bifurcation. The numerous advantages conferred by critical oscillation have led to its adoption by invertebrate as well as vertebrate auditory systems.
A. James Hudspeth received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D in 1973 and M.D. in 1974 from the same institution. After postdoctoral fellowships at Karolinska Institute and Harvard Medical School, he accepted a faculty position at the California Institute of Technology. He relocated to the University of California, San Francisco, in 1983, and in 1989 he moved to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, where he founded the school’s neuroscience program. Hudspeth has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1993. He joined Rockefeller in 1995 and was named the F.M. Kirby Professor. He is also director of the F.M. Kirby Center for Sensory Neuroscience.
Among many honors, Hudspeth has received a Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, a Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a Ralph W. Gerard Prize from the Society for Neuroscience, and a Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award. Hudspeth is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
MLS lectures are only open to the RU community and will be taking place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. Virtual participants are required to log in with their RU Zoom account and use their RU email address and password for authentication. We recommend signing out of VPN prior to logging in to the lecture. Please do not share the link or post on social media. - Open to
- Campus Only