A mouse listening to a sound in a lab is having its brain activity recorded by a two-photon microscope, revealing how thousands of neurons shift their behaviour as the animal learns. Most hearing research has focused on single neurons, but real hearing involves large populations of cells working together. This project will use advanced recording and manipulation techniques—two-photon imaging, microelectrode arrays, and optogenetics—to watch how entire circuits in the auditory system adapt to changing environments and to partial hearing loss. The gap is that we do not know how these population-level changes are coordinated across brain regions or influenced by non-auditory inputs like vision or attention. If successful, this fundamental science will provide the first detailed map of how auditory circuits reorganise themselves during learning and after hearing damage. This understanding could eventually inform therapies for the most common sensory disability in the developed world: not total deafness, but the inability to hear clearly in noisy environments. For now, the work is curiosity-driven—it asks how the brain builds a flexible representation of sound—but past discoveries in population coding have underpinned advances in cochlear implants and hearing aids.
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Our research aims to understand how sensory experience shapes the behaviour of populations of neurons. Rapid adjustments to neuronal response properties enable listening in changing environments, while longer term plasticity promotes perceptual learning and compensation for partial hearing loss. These adaptive changes have been studied at the single-neuron level, but little is known about how they are coordinated throughout the auditory system and by non-auditory factors, such as visual or neuro modulatory inputs. Our lab is experienced with cutting-edge techniques for recording and manipulating brain activity (two-photon imaging, highly parallel microelectrode recording, optogenetics), which provide an unprecedented view of how populations of neurons interact. We will combine these new techniques with our well-established physiological, anatomical, behavioural and analytical paradigms. This multidisciplinary expertise uniquely positions us to build an understanding of how neurons in th e auditory system are assembled into circuits which adapt to, represent, and enable learning about the changing structure of the auditory world. Hearing loss is the most common sensory disability in the developed world, but most people with hearing loss are not completely deaf. Instead, many struggle to hear accurately in noisy, changing environments. To develop effective therapies for this complex, widespread problem, we need to explore the population dynamics of auditory processing and how thi s is shaped by learning and altered experience. The research proposed here will open up a new understanding of these dynamics, providing a foundation for advancing our knowledge about the auditory brain and for developing future therapies for hearing loss.
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