The high sensitivity and wide bandwidth of mammalian hearing are thought to derive from an active process involving the somatic and hair-bundle motility of the thousands of outer hair cells uniquely found in mammalian cochleae. To better understand this, a biophysical three-dimensional cochlear fluid model was developed for gerbil, chinchilla, cat, and human, featuring an active “push-pull” cochlear amplifier mechanism based on the cytoarchitecture of the organ of Corti and using the time-averaged Lagrangian method. Cochlear responses are simulated and compared with in vivo physiological measurements for the basilar membrane (BM) velocity, VBM, frequency tuning of the BM vibration, and Q10 values representing the sharpness of the cochlear tuning curves. The VBM simulation results for gerbil and chinchilla are consistent with in vivo cochlea measurements. Simulated mechanical tuning curves based on maintaining a constant VBM value agree with neural-tuning threshold measurements better than those based on a constant displacement value, which implies that the inner hair cells are more sensitive to VBM than to BM displacement. The Q10 values of the VBM tuning curve agree well with those of cochlear neurons across species, and appear to be related in part to the width of the basilar membrane.
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