If I'm not mistaken, though, hair cells aren't really "fungible" / identical, right?
>Auditory hair cells are specialized along the length of the cochlea to respond to specific sound frequencies. ... Each of our roughly 16,000 hair cells is dedicated to a narrow frequency range. These cells are ordered along the basilar membrane according to the frequencies they detect. [1]
In that sense, they're dumb in terms of just encoding oscillation patterns, kind of like an electric guitar pickup, but even though a pickup is "dumb", you can get different results depending on the placement and type.
I'm just wondering if and how the newly generated hair cells somehow fit in where they're needed, and how general or controllable the process is.
they should be identical/fungible, it's the location that corresponds to the sound frequency, the nerves to be triggered are in the walls of the cochlea, underneath the hairs.
>Auditory hair cells are specialized along the length of the cochlea to respond to specific sound frequencies. ... Each of our roughly 16,000 hair cells is dedicated to a narrow frequency range. These cells are ordered along the basilar membrane according to the frequencies they detect. [1]
In that sense, they're dumb in terms of just encoding oscillation patterns, kind of like an electric guitar pickup, but even though a pickup is "dumb", you can get different results depending on the placement and type.
I'm just wondering if and how the newly generated hair cells somehow fit in where they're needed, and how general or controllable the process is.
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/hearing...