Let's get specific 2

Here's the next slide:



This slide is meant to illustrate all the progress we've been making in the past few years. I believe these data are a fair portrayal of the current state of the field. Data includes stuff from my own lab, and other leading labs in the field.

These data illustrate: synchronizing and non-synchronizing responses, low- and high-contrast responses, temporal and rate coding of sAM frequency, selectivity to ramped/damped stimulus waveform, presence of multi-peaked tuning, the integration time constant of neurons indicating their 'role in object processing', responses to low-probability sounds, synchronized onset responses, STRF-type mehtods providing descriptions of linear receptive fields and the mapping of arbitrary model parameters on the cortical surface.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to synthesize all these data (which on their own, are pretty well-done studies) into a cohesive picture. This lack of such a unifying picture is a matter of concern in certain circles in the field.

To a new student/uninitiated theorist, or even a relatively experienced person like myself, a read of current literature is very confusing, and any theorist attempting to understand and synthesize all the above data is bound to quickly depart in favor of greener pastures in vision and computer science.

The next slide in my talk to the thesis committee was a couple of quotes:

"The key observation is that neurophysiology and psychophysics have as their business to describe the behavior of cells or of subjects but not to explain such behavior."
- Marr, Vision, 1982

"If one just wants lots of varied evidence, one can assemble an encyclopaedia of facts, but the hypothesis that is their conjunction will be incredibly complex because the facts are so heterogenous."
- Lipton, Science, 2005

I think they hit the nail on the head (the aforementioned nail being the last one on the coffin of auditory cortex research, if we were to continue this way). All of the above results are important in themselves, they are results of testing hypotheses of themselves. Me and Elias call these 'point theories', and we believe it is misleading to go this route. But the picture is still hopeful: as long as the aspiring phenomenologist even thinks about linking up his contribution to atleast one stage below his level of description, we would have a much more cohesive picture.

Note: All the figures are taken from papers published in peer-reviewed journals. They represent contributions of many different labs. I'm not citing specific references because I feel that it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand: what's more important is the data that's out there, not who is doing what.



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