The Stochastic Resonance model of auditory perception: A unified explanation of tinnitus development, Zwicker tone illusion, and residual inhibition

Abstract

Stochastic Resonance (SR) has been proposed to play a major role in auditory perception, and to maintain optimal information transmission from the cochlea to the auditory system. By this, the auditory system could adapt to changes of the auditory input at second or even subsecond timescales. In case of reduced auditory input, somatosensory projections to the dorsal cochlear nucleus would be disinhibited in order to improve hearing thresholds by means of SR. As a side effect, the increased somatosensory input corresponding to the observed tinnitus-associated neuronal hyperactivity is then perceived as tinnitus. In addition, the model can also explain transient phantom tone perceptions occurring after ear plugging, or the Zwicker tone illusion. Vice versa, the model predicts that via stimulation with acoustic noise, SR would not be needed to optimize information transmission, and hence somatosensory noise would be tuned down, resulting in a transient vanishing of tinnitus, an effect referred to as residual inhibition.

Improved pure tone sensitivity after simulated hearing loss

“…In terms of time scale, the induced phantom sounds are at an intermediate level between chronic lifelong tinnitus on the one end and the only seconds lasting Zwicker tone percepts (Zwicker 1964) on the other end of the spectrum. Within the stochastic resonance framework of auditory processing, all these phantom sounds are caused by the same mechanism and do just occur on different time scales (Schilling et al, 2020b). Furthermore, the presented results are similar to ear plugging studies, where healthy human subjects are provided with ear plugs for two weeks, mimicking hearing loss.…”

“…This neural hyperactivity in turn, was found to be correlated with subjective tinnitus in many studies. Our model provides a unified mechanistic explanation how hearing loss, phantom perceptions like tinnitus and Zwicker tone (Zwicker 1964), and neural hyperactivity are related to each other (Schilling et al, 2020b). Finally, our model predicts that patients with hearing loss and with tinnitus on average have better hearing thresholds than those without tinnitus: tinnitus is the perception of the increased neural noise from the somatosensory system, and this noise helps to increase auditory sensitivity by means of stochastic resonance.…”

“…We presented a novel experimental paradigm to simulate transient hearing loss, which in turn induced improvement of hearing thresholds and perception of phantom sounds, both in line with our hypothesis that stochastic resonance plays a major role in the auditory system. The converging evidence from numerous empirical (for an overview see Krauss et al, 2018 andSchilling et al, 2020b) and theoretical studies (Krauss et al, 2016;Schilling et al, 2020a) indicates that the auditory system actually exploits stochastic resonance and actively tunes the intensity of required noise by adjusting the somatosensory input to the dorsal cochlear nucleus. By that, stochastic resonance contributes crucially to the auditory system's ability to adapt to changing sound pressure levels.…”

Analysis of continuous neuronal activity evoked by natural speech with computational corpus linguistics methods

“…for creating so-called embeddings of the raw data [122]. Moreover, as proposed by Kriegeskorte [123], our neural corpus can serve to test [124] computational models of brain function [125][126][127][128], in particular models based on neural networks [129][130][131] and machine learning architectures [132,133], in order to iteratively increase biological and cognitive fidelity [123].…”

Auditory noise improves balance control by cross-modal stochastic resonance

“…It has reported that hearing perception is modified by two other major sensory systems: vision and somatosensation [38,39]. This synthesis occurs at every level of the ascending auditory pathway from the cochlear nucleus to the auditory cortex [40,41]. This convergence seems to be the neural correlate for audio-tactile SR [23].…”