Fig. 1.

Coupled hair bundles. (A) Schematic view of a group of hair cells (HC), stereociliary bundles are elastically coupled via an overlying gelatinous membrane (side view). (B) Representation of coupled hair bundles (top view). Hair bundles are arranged on a square lattice with spacing d. Each hair bundle is labeled according to its position (i,j) on the lattice where i = 1,…,N, j = 1,…,M and N·M is the total number of hair bundles. Solid lines represent elastic springs. The excitatory direction of the hair bundles is the positive X direction.