Figure 8. Schematic of dereverberation by auditory cortex.

Natural environments contain different levels of reverberation (illustrated by the left cochleagrams). Neurons in auditory cortex adjust their inhibitory receptive fields to ameliorate the effects of reverberation, with delayed inhibition for more reverberant environments (center). The consequence of this adaptive process is to arrive at a representation of the sound in which reverberation is reduced (right cochleagram).