Related papers: Universality and individuality in a neural code
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
Precise timing of spikes and temporal locking are key elements of neural computation. Here we demonstrate how even strongly heterogeneous, deterministic neural networks with delayed interactions and complex topology can exhibit periodic…
Understanding how the dynamics of neural networks is shaped by the computations they perform is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Recently, the framework of efficient coding proposed a theory of how spiking neural networks can compute…
Providing the neurobiological basis of information processing in higher animals, spiking neural networks must be able to learn a variety of complicated computations, including the generation of appropriate, possibly delayed reactions to…
In this paper, I examine what I refer to as the spike doctrine, which is the generally held belief in neuroscience that information in the brain is encoded by sequences of neural action potentials. I present the argument that specific…
Recent experimental and theoretical work on neural populations belonging to two separate early sensory systems, olfaction and vision, has challenged the notion that the two operate under different computational paradigms by providing…
Frequency discrimination is a fundamental task of the auditory system. The mammalian inner ear, or cochlea, provides a place code in which different frequencies are detected at different spatial locations. However, a temporal code based on…
The problem of spike encoding of sound consists in transforming a sound waveform into spikes. It is of interest in many domains, including the development of audio-based spiking neural networks, where it is the first and most crucial stage…
To evaluate the nature of the neural code in the cerebral cortex, we have used a combination of theory and experiment to assess how information is represented in a realistic cortical population response. We have shown how a sensory stimulus…
Understanding brain function, constructing computational models and engineering neural prosthetics require assessing two problems, namely encoding and decoding, but their relation remains controversial. For decades, the encoding problem has…
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…
There is growing evidence regarding the importance of spike timing in neural information processing, with even a small number of spikes carrying information, but computational models lag significantly behind those for rate coding.…
A neuron transforms its input into output spikes, and this transformation is the basic unit of computation in the nervous system. The spiking response of the neuron to a complex, time-varying input can be predicted from the detailed…
Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…
Neurons in the brain represent external stimuli via neural codes. These codes often arise from stereotyped stimulus-response maps, associating to each neuron a convex receptive field. An important problem confronted by the brain is to infer…
The coding mechanism of sensory memory on the neuron scale is one of the most important questions in neuroscience. We have put forward a quantitative neural network model, which is self organized, self similar, and self adaptive, just like…
Deep learning has recently led to great successes in tasks such as image recognition (e.g Krizhevsky et al., 2012). However, deep networks are still outmatched by the power and versatility of the brain, perhaps in part due to the richer…
A rigorous understanding of brain dynamics and function requires a conceptual bridge between multiple levels of organization, including neural spiking and network-level population activity. Mounting evidence suggests that neural networks of…
Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments, which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a…
The synergy between spiking neural networks and neuromorphic hardware holds promise for the development of energy-efficient AI applications. Inspired by this potential, we revisit the foundational aspects to study the capabilities of…