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Noise in neurons is message-dependent

Guillermo A. Cecchi·Mariano Sigman·Jose-Manuel Alonso·Luis Martinez·Dante R. Chialvo·Marcelo O. Magnasco
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Abstract

Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that such variability is a function of the input, and can be made arbitrarily large or small by a suitable choice of inputs. Our considerations are expected to extend to virtually any mechanism of spike generation, and we illustrate them with data from the visual pathway. Thus, a simplification usually made in the application of information theory to neural processing is violated: noise {\sl is not independent of the message}. However, we also show the existence of {\sl error-correcting} topologies, which can achieve better timing reliability than their components.

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Guillermo A. Cecchi, Mariano Sigman, Jose-Manuel Alonso, Luis Martinez, Dante R. Chialvo, Marcelo O. Magnasco. 2000-04-28. Noise in neurons is message-dependent. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.100113597

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