Thalamic gamma band desynchronization in a computational model of the auditory pathway.

Recent studies have focused on modeling the response of the early auditory processing stages to sound stimuli. However, the influence of sound on the higher stages like the auditory thalamus are not well identified. To understand how different sound stimuli affect the response of neurons in these higher stages, it is necessary to model the auditory pathway from the auditory nerve (AN) through the different stages up to the cortex. In this article we present a model of one of the paths through which sound travels from the AN to the cortex. The model presented is a compound of several sub models of different stages of the auditory pathway which offers a detailed resolution due to the subsequent simulation of processing stages. We consider neurons from the AN, the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN), the thalamus (specific and non-specific thalamic cells and reticular nucleus) and cortical columns simulating attended and unattended conditions. We use pure tone stimuli with different frequencies as an input and analyze the power spectra of the thalamic and cortical neurons. The main difference in the power spectra can be seen in the specific thalamic cells (STC), where a clear loss of power in the gamma band of the neurons responsible for processing the sound input occurred.