Integrate-and-Fire-type models are usually criticized because of their simplicity. On the other hand, the Integrate-and-Fire model is the basis of most of the theoretical studies on spiking neuron models. Here, we develop a sequential procedure to quantitatively evaluate an equivalent Integrate-and-Fire-type model based on intracellular recordings of cortical pyramidal neurons. We find that the...

In vivo recordings in rat somatosensory cortex suggest that excitatory and inhibitory inputs are often correlated during spontaneous and sensory-evoked activity. Using a computational approach, we study how the interplay of input correlations and timing observed in experiments controls the spiking probability of single neurons. Several correlation-based mechanisms are identified, which can effe...

The observations of BEC have stimulated interest in atom lasers, coherent sources of atomic matter waves. The build-up of atoms in the ground state of a magnetic trap is analogous to stimulated emission into a single mode of an optical laser. An important element of a laser is an output coupler, which provides a controlled way of generating a coherent propagating beam. We demonstrated a scheme ...

We examine the spiking axon as a communication channel. We develop a .rst principles channel model that encompasses the noise in the axon, which manifests itself as spike jitter, and the power consumption, which arises from the activity of the Na–K pump. This model enables us to examine the trade-o4 between the information rate and power consumption. Using parameters from the frog myelinated ax...

Biological phenomenon. Spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) in its narrow sense refers to the change in the synaptic strength as a result of electrically eliciting pairs of action potentials (‘spikes’) with a fixed time difference between the preand post-synaptic action potentials (Markram et al., 1997; Bi and Poo, 1998; Sjostrom et al., 2001). STDP is typically observed for synapses betwee...

In this paper the coding capabilities of individual retinal ganglion cells are compared with respect to the coding capabilities of small population of cells using different neural networks. This approach allows not only the identification of the most discriminating cells, but also detection of the parameters that are more important for the discrimination task. Our results show that the spike ra...