Fig. 1. A schematic drawing of the ascending auditory pathway in rat. The auditory nerve carries signals from hair cells of cochlea into cochlear nucleus, where acoustic information projects to other brainstem auditory nuclei. Signals from the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN) travel to the superior olivary complex (SOC), which comprises three important subgroups (LSO, MSO, MNTB) involved in the localization of sound in space. The SOC sends projections primarily to the inferior colliculus (IC), while information from the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) projects directly to the IC. From the IC, auditory messages proceed to the medial geniculate body (MGB, a subregion of thalamus), which in turn projects to the primary auditory cortex (A1), located in the temporal lobe of cerebrum.