Directional Hearing by the Mauthner System

We provide a computational description of the function of the Mauthner system. This is the brainstem circuit which initiates fast-start escapes in teleost fish in response to sounds. Our simulations, using backpropagation in a realistically constrained feedforward network, have generated hypotheses which are directly interpretable in terms of the activity of the auditory nerve fibers, the principle cells of the system and their associated inhibitory neurons.