Thursday, December 18, 2008

Beginning the blog

This blogging stuff was new to me a few weeks ago when I started the Jeff Winer blog, a tribute to a colleague who was ill. Now it seems like a very good idea. 

Auditory Neuroanatomy is a combination of neuroanatomy (anatomy of the nervous system) the auditory system, the neural system used for hearing. Although neuroanatomy had its foundation in gross anatomy, the current field of neuroanatomy has much more in common with cell biology than gross. We are interested in the morphology of neurons in the auditory system and the neural circuits that they form. But, there is so much more. 

I see this blog as a conversation about the neurons and circuits in the auditory system. What are they? What is their genotype? What is their phenotype? This is not your father's neuroanatomy. We need to harness the tools of molecular biology and genetics to address these issues. We also need to correlate the findings from those fields with data from biophysics and auditory physiology.

What do you think?