Essential Nonlinearities in Hearing

作者：Victor M. Eguı́luz, Mark Ospeck, Yong Choe, Albert James Hudspeth, Marcelo O. Magnasco · 发表于：Physical Review Letters · 年份：2000 · DOI：10.1103/physrevlett.84.5232 · 被引用次数：417 · 研究领域：Hearing, Cochlea, Tinnitus, Genetics、Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies、Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation

Our hearing organ, the cochlea, evidently poises itself at a Hopf bifurcation to maximize tuning and amplification. We show that in this condition several effects are expected to be generic: compression of the dynamic range, infinitely sharp tuning at zero input, and generation of combination tones. These effects are "essentially" nonlinear in that they become more marked the smaller the forcing: there is no audible sound soft enough not to evoke them. All the well-documented nonlinear aspects of hearing therefore appear to be consequences of the same underlying mechanism.