Related papers: Motor control by precisely timed spike patterns

Studies of motor control have almost universally examined firing rates to investigate how the brain shapes behavior. In principle, however, neurons could encode information through the precise temporal patterning of their spike trains as…

Our knowledge of the sensory world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant…

In the last century, most sensorimotor studies of cortical neurons relied on average firing rates. Rate coding is efficient for fast sensorimotor processing that occurs within a few seconds. Much less is known about the neural mechanisms…

The problem of deciphering how low-level patterns (action potentials in the brain, amino acids in a protein, etc.) drive high-level biological features (sensorimotor behavior, enzymatic function) represents the central challenge of…

The problem of neural coding is to understand how sequences of action potentials (spikes) are related to sensory stimuli, motor outputs, or (ultimately) thoughts and intentions. One clear question is whether the same coding rules are used…

Why do neurons communicate through spikes? By definition, spikes are all-or-none neural events which occur at continuous times. In other words, spikes are on one side binary, existing or not without further details, and on the other can…

Neurons communicate with downstream systems via sparse and incredibly brief electrical pulses, or spikes. Using these events, they control various targets such as neuromuscular units, neurosecretory systems, and other neurons in connected…

Practice of a complex motor gesture involves exploration of motor space to attain a better match to target output, but little is known about the neural code for such exploration. Here, we examine spiking in an area of the songbird brain…

In nature, animals encounter high dimensional sensory stimuli that have complex statistical and dynamical structure. Attempts to study the neural coding of these natural signals face challenges both in the selection of the signal ensemble…

At the single-neuron level, precisely timed spikes can either constitute firing-rate codes or spike-pattern codes that utilize the relative timing between consecutive spikes. There has been little experimental support for the hypothesis…

We demonstrate that the information contained in the spike occurrence times of a population of neurons can be broken up into a series of terms, each of which reflect something about potential coding mechanisms. This is possible in the…

The success of deep learning in the past decade is partially shrouded in the shadow of adversarial attacks. In contrast, the brain is far more robust at complex cognitive tasks. Utilizing the advantage that neurons in the brain communicate…

A key question in neuroscience is at which level functional meaning emerges from biophysical phenomena. In most vertebrate systems, precise functions are assigned at the level of neural populations, while single-neurons are deemed…

The timing of individual neuronal spikes is essential for biological brains to make fast responses to sensory stimuli. However, conventional artificial neural networks lack the intrinsic temporal coding ability present in biological…

It has long been debated whether information in the brain is coded at the rate of neuronal spiking or at the precise timing of single spikes. Although this issue is essential to the understanding of neural signal processing, it is not…

Spike patterns have been reported to encode sensory information in several brain areas. Here we assess the role of specific patterns in the neural code, by comparing the amount of information transmitted with different choices of the…

Neurons in the nervous system convey information to higher brain regions by the generation of spike trains. An important question in the field of computational neuroscience is how these sensory neurons encode environmental information in a…

A good understanding of how neurons use electrical pulses (i.e, spikes) to encode the signal information remains elusive. Analyzing spike sequences generated by individual neurons and by two coupled neurons (using the stochastic…

The nervous system represents time-dependent signals in sequences of discrete action potentials or spikes, all spikes are identical so that information is carried only in the spike arrival times. We show how to quantify this information, in…

Understanding a neural code requires knowledge both of the elementary symbols that transmit information and of the algorithm for translating these symbols into sensory signals or motor actions. We show that these questions can be separated:…