Firing Rates and Weil-Timed Events in the Cerebral Cortex

Abstract

The prevailing view is that the firing times of a neuron are the realizations of a stochastic point process with variable underlying rate functions. The immediate outcome of this view are a host of procedures that estimate this putative underlying rate and its dependance on other observable events. In this contribution some of the most frequently used estimation procedures will be described. There are several pieces of experimental evidence that do not conform to the view that all that there is to neuronal firing is the underlying firing rate. The implication of these observations to neural network modeling is discussed.