The conference has now closed. You can view photographs from the event here.
Our good friend and colleague, Professor Dexter Irvine, is planning to retire from his long-standing academic affiliation (of more than 30 years, boy and man) at Monash University shortly before the forthcoming 7th IBRO World Congress of Neuroscience, to be held in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2007.
To celebrate and honour Dexter’s contribution to auditory neuroscience, some of his colleagues and former students have been organizing a satellite meeting (the ‘Dexterfest’ or, as he would have it, the ‘Festering Dexter’), to be held just before the main IBRO meeting, at the beautiful ocean-side resort of Lorne. Lorne is on the Great Ocean Road in south western Victoria, about 160 km from Melbourne.
The auditory brain has traditionally been viewed as a group of nuclei that ‘relay’ ascending auditory information from the cochlea to the cerebral cortex. In the last decade, that view has been turned on its head as we become increasingly aware of the importance and function of descending systems that have their origins within and beyond the primary cortex, yet dynamically influence auditory structures right out to the ear. At the same time, we realize that many more cortical areas participate in the processing and awareness of auditory signals, including speech, and should thus rightly be incorporated into the central auditory system. Both of these developments have received attention because of their primary role in listening – the integration of neuroacoustic information with other cognitive and transmodal networks, leading to perception and action.
Through a lifetime of contribution to our current understanding of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up influences on auditory system function, Dexter Irvine has done much to establish this new paradigm of the auditory brain. In this Symposium, we honour Dexter’s influence through a series of invited and contributed presentations that cover the range of his interests.
This conference has been arranged with help from the following organisations:
This page was last updated on 22 October 2007