A simplified diagram of the auditory pathway

I'm currently working on analog electronic models of the auditory pathway. These pages will show you my advances as I go along. I have 3 main reasons for building models of neural processing in the auditory pathway:

• Firstly, a faithful neural model will allow the study of neural processing in the brain without the need for living neural tissue and without the need for simultaneously probing hundreds or thousands of neurons in the brain. Once we have neuron models with the same transfer function as biological neurons, and knowledge of their input and output connections, we can build a hardware model that allows us to study the collective behaviour of such a neural network and the individual behaviour of the single neurons in the network.
• Secondly, we can hope that by using similar processing strategies as the brain, it will be possible to perform perceptive tasks with the hardware model hereby approaching the excellent performance of the brain on such tasks. In this case, the neuron model might not need to replicate the biological neuron as faithful as in the first case. However, since the actual amount of detail that has to be included in order for the model to function is unknown, the only safe way to build such a model is to reproduce the biological neuron as faithful as possible. Once a functional model is built it will allow us to distil the amount of detail needed for a certain function and thus to create a simpler model. Because of natural evolution it is very well possible though that most of the details of the processing performed by a biological neuron are important.
• Thirdly, one has to do something to earn a PhD title. :-)