Reliability and representational bandwidth in the auditory cortex

It is unclear why there are so many more neurons in sensory cortex than in the sensory periphery. One possibility is that these "extra" neurons are used to overcome cortical noise and faithfully represent the acoustic stimulus. Another possibility is that even after overcoming cortical noise, there is "excess representational bandwidth" available and that this bandwidth is used to represent conjunctions of auditory and nonauditory information for computation. Here, we discuss recent data about neuronal reliability in auditory cortex showing that cortical noise may not be as high as was previously believed. Although at present, the data suggest that auditory cortex neurons can be more reliable than those in the visual cortex, we speculate that the principles governing cortical computation are universal and that visual and other cortical areas can also exploit strategies based on similarly high-fidelity activity.