Is A1 dead and gone?

Maybe the field is claiming an unofficial triumph that primary auditory cortex (A1) is a solved ('cracked') problem. Most present labs are moving toward secondary areas... it's almost like unofficially accepting that it is becoming increasingly difficult to publish/get grants to do work in A1. Seriously, if I report 'interesting' spectro-temporal stuff in A1, can I even get it into JARO?

Elias claims he was being sarcastic when he told me the above, but I believe it. We've opened up so many possibilities looking in unexplored areas, that A1 is just plain boring (what, it responds to tones? Didn't we know that in 1973?). This is strange, cause Fitzpatrick published an excellent V1 anatomy paper that I presented at journal club, and Ferster came out with a great one this week in Neuron. V1 research is more saturated, but still keeps coming. Maybe V1 is more complex than A1? Aha... (if I can get that out of a self-pitying auditory neurophysiologist).

Sum up V1 in a sentence: 'robust edge detection at multiple resolutions, computational basis for parsing objects in a scene'. Sum up A1 in a sentence: 'it responds to tones'. No wait, 'tonotopically organised response to tones'. Oh, and let's not forget 'non-monotonicity'. And 'temporal processing'. How about 'A1 is actually doing object recognition because thalamus neurons are feature sensitive'. At this point, I can just quote W: 'You forgot Poland'.

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