Optimizing A Communication System By Neural Circuits:The Magic Number 4 And Golden Ratio

For a new class of circuit models of neurons we demonstrate here that an artificial but robust and efficient communication system can be constructed using one neural circuit as an encoder/transmitter and another as a receiver/decoder, for which metastableplastic spike-bursts with the minimal bursting periods are used for its alphabet. We also demonstrate that the spike-bursting alphabet is frequency-modulated onto the encoder’s ion pump current as the signal. We further demonstrate that for this spike-excitation-encodingdecoding (SEED) system, the quadrary alphabet tends to give the maximal transmission rate for all possible sources. We also demonstrate that by a trivial source-to-channel encoding, a binary source with the Golden Ratio distribution can be transmitted at the channel capacity of a binary SEED system.