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The research in my laboratory has been centered on understanding how auditory information is progressively transformed and encoded by neural circuits along the ascending/descending central auditory pathway for generating perception and behaviors.The specific topic of my talk is about sparse coding.Probably many have heard about a wide-spread nonscientific myth that an average person uses only about 10%of his/her brain.Interestingly,it has been discovered in the past decades that only a small percentage of cortical neurons respond with spikes under a given sensory stimulus,with a vast majority of neurons being relatively silent.This salient property of sparse representation in auditory cortex may reflect a fundamental principle/strategy for how the external acoustic environment is represented by cortical neuronal populations.