This project is no longer available.

PhD in Neuroscience

with Prof Alan Palmer, Dr Trevor Shackleton and Dr Chris Sumner
alan@ihr.mrc.ac.uk, trevor@ihr.mrc.ac.uk, chris@ihr.mrc.ac.uk

A fundamental organisational principle of the auditory system is that sounds in the environment are sampled at two discrete locations (the two ears) and immediately split into separate frequency bands, which are maintained all the way up to the cortex (Pickles, 2008). However, from these separate channels of information the brain manages to produce a strong perception of individual objects from discrete locations in space. In this project we will record the responses of single and groups of neurones in an animal brain to stimuli which both span frequency and are presented to separate ears in order to determine how and where this integration takes place.

Much is known about how information is combined across the two ears to produce a code for sound location, and how the information in each frequency channel is analysed to produce codes for other, non-spatial, sound qualities, such as vowel identity in speech. However, little is known about how these separate codes are then recombined to represent auditory objects. This project will be concerned with two major aspects of how this recombination is performed: how closely neural responses in cortex and at lower processing levels reflect perceptual phenomena that require the integration across ears and across frequency bands and the coding mechanisms by which these responses come about.

This project is aimed at mathematically adept graduates with a first- or upper second-class degree from life sciences (such as biology or neuroscience) or mathematical subjects (including physics and computer science). You will be taught state-of-the-art laboratory methods for recording from neurons in the brain of animals and use advanced computational techniques for data analysis.

Pickles JO (2008) An Introduction to the Physiology of Hearing. Academic Press, London