Harmonic analysis of spiking neuronal pairs

Harmonic analysis is applied to analyze the transmission of bandlimited signals via spike trains generated by a pair of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) model neurons organized in a push-pull, or ‘on/off’, configuration. It is found that lowpass signals can be transmitted with only moderate distortion utilizing mean spike rates with many spikes per signal coherence time. The transmission of bandpass signals is accomplished through phase locking of the output spikes to the input signal over a wide range of frequencies, using one or two spikes per coherence time of the signal, but in this case with limited dynamic range in amplitude. Noise-free LIF-generated spike trains decoded with linear filters can transmit information at an average rate of 2-3 bits per spike.