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The Journal of Neuroscience, November 5, 2008, 28(45):11615-11621; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3972-08.2008

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Corticofugal Modulation of Initial Sound Processing in the Brain

Feng Luo, Qianzhou Wang, Alireza Kashani, and Jun Yan

Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Jun Yan, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive, N.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1. Email: juyan{at}ucalgary.ca

The brain selectively extracts the most relevant information in top-down processing manner. Does the corticofugal system, a "back projection system," constitute the neural basis of such top-down selection? Here, we show how focal activation of the auditory cortex with 500 nA electrical pulses influences the auditory information processing in the cochlear nucleus (CN) that receives almost unprocessed information directly from the ear. We found that cortical activation increased the response magnitudes and shortened response latencies of physiologically matched CN neurons, whereas decreased response magnitudes and lengthened response latencies of unmatched CN neurons. In addition, cortical activation shifted the frequency tunings of unmatched CN neurons toward those of the activated cortical neurons. Our data suggest that cortical activation selectively enhances the neural processing of particular auditory information and attenuates others at the first processing level in the brain based on sound frequencies encoded in the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex apparently implements a long-range feedback mechanism to select or filter incoming signals from the ear.

Key words: auditory cortex; corticofugal; cochlear nucleus; neural plasticity; neurophysiology; mouse

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Received Aug. 20, 2008; revised Sept. 29, 2008; accepted Oct. 1, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Jun Yan, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive, N.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1. Email: juyan{at}ucalgary.ca

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