The neural basis of perceptual sensitivity to sound in auditory cortex of the mouse.

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The auditory world is noisy and full of distractions, but our brains are remarkably good at detecting, and extracting important sounds while ignoring the background. If a person mentions your name at the other end of a noisy room, it is quite likely that you will stop what you‘re doing, and listen to the speaker‘s words. As you do this, you lose awareness of the other noisy goings on around you. How the brain performs this amazing task is the subject of my research. My goals are to determine: - How the brain responds to important sounds when they occur in noisy environments.- How the brain improves sound detection in noisy environments using the natural properties of sound.- How the brain signals that it has heard an important sound.To do this, I‘m going to present sounds to mice and record brain activity in auditory cortex, which is thought to be involved in higher-level processing of sound. I will train mice to perform a task where they must listen and indicate when they have heard a particular sound. I will explore whether their brain activity differs between occasions when indicate they have or have not heard the sound.