The Active Traveling Wave in the Cochlea

Abstract

A sound stimulus entering the inner ear excites a deformation of the basilar membrane which travels along the cochlea towards the apex. It is well established that this wave-like disturbance is amplified by an active system. Recently, it has been proposed that the active system consists of a set of self-tuned critical oscillators which automatically operate at an oscillatory instability. Here, we show how the concepts of a traveling wave and of self-tuned critical oscillators can be combined to describe the nonlinear wave in the cochlea.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (1)

• The Cochlear Tuning Curve

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Are biological systems poised at criticality?
• Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems
• The physics of hearing: fluid mechanics and the active process of the inner ear
• Dual contribution to amplification in the mammalian inner ear
• Mimicking the active cochlea with a fluid-coupled array of subwavelength Hopf resonators
• Human pitch is pre-cortical: The essential role of the cochlear fluid
• Optimizing the vertebrate vestibular semicircular canal: could we balance any better?
• Taxis of cargo-carrying microswimmers in traveling activity waves
• Frequency locking in auditory hair cells: Distinguishing between additive and parametric forcing
• Hair cells in the cochlea must tune resonant modes to the edge of instability without destabilizing collective modes
• Molding the asymmetry of localized frequency-locking waves by a generalized forcing and implications to the inner ear
• Modeling cochlear two-tone suppression using a system of nonlinear oscillators with feed-forward coupling