Information Flows to Auditory Hair Bundles near Criticality

Auditory sense cells are extremely sensitive. Prior research into the sensitivity of these cells has focused on the active mechanical response of hair bundles, their sensory organelles, to external forcing, and highlighted the consistency of this response with the dynamics near a specific critical point. Using a generic model for the universal dynamics near that critical point, we explore hair bundle sensitivity from the perspective of information flows, measuring the information extracted by a generic critical sensor from forcing input signals.