Primed for Sound

Infants are born ready to process the various sights, sounds and smells they will encounter outside of the womb because their sensory systems have been primed. Before birth, spontaneous bursts of electrical activity along sensory pathways help to refine connections between neurons and prepare the brain to encounter stimuli in the outside world. To practice the art of hearing for example, hair cells in the inner ear produce electrical bursts similar to how they would respond to real sounds. Interestingly, the hair cells themselves don’t trigger this spontaneous activity, but rather the cells that support them. Scientists recently found that in the mouse inner ear (shown here), spontaneous bursts are triggered when a specific receptor found on nearby supporting cells is activated. Understanding how these supporting cells prepare us for processing real life sights, sounds and smells may shed light on sensory disorders that we currently don’t know how to treat.

Written by Gaëlle Coullon

Gaëlle Coullon

Writer

Gaëlle is a consultant and trainer in research communication and commercialisation. As an ex-neuroscientist, she is always looking for new ways to combine her love of writing with everything brain related.

• Image from work by Travis A Babola and colleagues
• The Solomon Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, January 2020