Ph.D. Bryn Mawr College Postdoc. University of Pennsylvania Sound is pervasive and ubiquitous. It seems obvious and simple enough to understand the survival value of hearing.
Animals utilize sound to localize mates and avoid approaching predators.
We chart our course of actions according to nature and source of sound, not to mention the importance of verbal communication in our daily life. Recent studies in our laboratory with the ring dove unveil some surprising findings. The robust connections between the central auditory sytem and the hypothalamus, the power house of endocrine control, permit sound and hence the information it carries to penetrate into our inner state of emotion. Armed with neuroanatomical tract tracing techniques and electrophysiological methods such as single unit recording, antidromic, collision techniques, together with behavioral and neuroencrine studies, we have been able to demonstrate the anatomical connections between the central auditory relay and the hypothalamus, the functional connections between hearing species-specific courtship calls and specific endocrine response to these calls. A direct demonstration of the causal connection between acoustic response unit activity in the auditory thalamus and pituitary secretions is now underway in our laboratory.