Learning and coding in neural networks

Abstract

How do neurons process, encode, and transmit information? This is a central question in neuroscience, referred to as the “neural coding” issue. There is a broad agreement that spikes are the basic currency for transmitting information between neurons, the reason being that they can propagate over large distances. How the brain actually uses them to encode information remains more controversial. In particular, the issue of the relevant timescales is intensely debated: do individual spike times matter, or does one need counting them over a long time window (say a few tens of milliseconds) to obtain a meaningful, reliable quantity? (see also Chapter 17).