The neuroanatomical substrate for information processing in macular endorgans

Ultrastructural study of inner-ear gravity receptors shows that they are functionally organized as weighted neural networks for parallel distributed processing of acceleratory information. Receptive fields, consisting of type I and type II hair cells, were reconstructed as three-dimensional shaded solids using an IRIS workstation. Three patterns occur in the striola-border direction: rounded, oblong, and nearly linear. No two fields are identical. Type II cells distribute information to 2-4 nerve terminals. Findings suggest that receptive field morphology results from an interaction between genomes and spatial containment of growth. Resulting randomness and redundancy are important to the robustness of the neural network, The end product of afferent processing is probably a highly redundant communication in which noise is reduced by efferent inhibition.<>