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?
But can one separate out the neuro-anatomical facts from what these neural structures - the brainstem auditory nuclei for example - actually do? Clearly, you note the need to correlate with biophysics & auditory physiology - but I'd suggest you need to consider both auditory psychophysics and the ecological nature of auditory perception as well. I'm interested in replicating their amazing capabilities in silicon (or artificially anyway) - in auditory neuromorphic systems. I can quite see that the interest from a medical or hearing aid perspective might be different, but I'd suggest that we won't *really* understand these systems till we can replicate them synthetically!
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