The ability to hear and the direction of gaze aren't necessarily linked. It's exciting to find that the circuits in the brain that control gaze direction affect how the brain processes auditory information.

Now that we have found that the principle applies in owls as well as monkeys, we can figure out the mechanisms of how the brain manages attention.

Relatively nothing is known about how the brain increases and decreases signaling. We want to discover the cellular mechanisms of how attention works.