A. a Probabilistic Approach to Certain Neuroelectric Phenomena

An acoustic stimulus presented at the ear of an anesthetized cat evokes an electrical response from the auditory nerve of that animal. Our primary stimuli to date have been clicks produced by feeding rectangular pulses of duration 0. 1 msec into a PDR-10 earphone. These short stimuli evoke spike-like responses, which are detected by a fine wire electrode placed within the bullar cavity. Suitable electrode placement makes these click responses substantially free of microphonic contamination (1, 2). A typical response is shown in Fig. XIII-1. The earliest neural component, labeled N 1 , can be assumed to represent the synchronous and summated firing of first order auditory neurons. The peak-to-peak ampli-