Electrical transmission line properties of the cat cochlea

This is an item from the Proceedings of the Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society (1977), 8, published by Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society. This version is reproduced with the permission of publisher.Some properties of cochlear microphonic and summating potential distributions recorded from the cochlear scalae may be accounted for by a consideration of the distributed resistive and reactive elements which load the cochlear generators (Haas, 1973). These distributed elements result in the cochlea behaving as an electrical transmission line. One property of the transmission line which characterises its longitudinal properties is the length constant and this has been measured by Bekesy (1951) and Johnstone et al. (1966) who have demonstrated in the guinea pig a value of 2 mm between scala media and scala tympani and 1.4 mm between scala vestibuli and scala tympani in the basal turn