  The auditory and vestibular systems exhibit remarkable sensitivity of
detection, responding to deflections on the order of Angstroms, even in the
presence of biological noise. Further, these complex systems exhibit high
temporal acuity and frequency selectivity, allowing us to make sense of the
acoustic world around us. As this acoustic environment of interest spans
several orders of magnitude in both amplitude and frequency, these systems rely
heavily on nonlinearities and power-law scaling. The behavior of these sensory
systems has been extensively studied in the context of dynamical systems
theory, with many empirical phenomena described by critical dynamics. Other
phenomena have been explained by systems in the chaotic regime, where weak
perturbations drastically impact the future state of the system. We first
review the conceptual framework behind these two types of detectors, as well as
the detection features that they can capture. We then explore the intersection
of the two types of systems and propose ideal parameter regimes for auditory
and vestibular systems.
