People argue about large details of the cochlea.
We're just now starting to find out. Three of the speakers at this conference have agreed to come speak about their work here at Stanford. First up is Shihab Shamma, auditory neurophysilogist extraordinaire, from the University of Maryland. Shihab's group has been using rippled spectra, sounds with a periodic spectrum, to measure the behaviour of cortical neurons. If you play enough of these sounds to a neuron, you can characterize its response and predict what will get the cell really excited.