http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/research/DNS/speakers/Shamma.html Professor Shihab Shamma from the University of Maryland presents the “Temporal coherence and the cortical analysis of complex auditory scenes “ Humans and many other animals can sort out and organize the perception of their complex auditory scenes remarkably rapidly and with an ability that is the envy of the most sophisticated engineering algorithms. It is hypothesized here that the key principle underlying this ability is ” temporal coherence”, a rapid adaptive process that allows the brain to segregate sound sources based on the correlation among the responses to their acoustic features. In this talk, I shall review the theoretical underpinnings of this process, discuss the latest supporting physiological evidence in various cortical areas, and summarize how all these findings can be integrated into effective algorithms to understand and mimic this ability.