A fast ion can electronically excite a solid producing a track of damage, a process initially used to detect energetic particles but now used to alter materials. From the seminal paper by Fleischer et al. [Phys. Rev. 156, 353 (1967)] to the present, "Coulomb explosion" and thermal spike models have been often treated as competing models for describing ion track effects. Here molecular dynamics ...

Neural adaptation underlies the ability of neurons to maximize encoded information over a wide dynamic range of input stimuli. Recent spiking neuron models like the adaptive Spike Response Model implement adaptation as additive fixed-size fast spike-triggered threshold dynamics and slow spike-triggered currents. Such adaptation accurately models neural spiking behavior over a limited dynamic in...

In central neurons, the threshold for spike initiation can depend on the stimulus and varies between cells and between recording sites in a given cell, but it is unclear what mechanisms underlie this variability. Properties of ionic channels are likely to play a role in threshold modulation. We examined in models the influence of Na channel activation, inactivation, slow voltage-gated channels ...

Existing current based models that capture spike activity, though useful in studying information processing capabilities of neurons, fail to throw light on their internal functioning. It is imperative to develop a model that captures the spike train of a neuron as a function of its intracellular parameters for non-invasive diagnosis of diseased neurons. This is the first ever article to present...

Neural networks can be simulated exactly using event-driven strategies, in which the algorithm advances directly from one spike to the next spike. It applies to neuron models for which we have (1) an explicit expression for the evolution of the state variables between spikes and (2) an explicit test on the state variables that predicts whether and when a spike will be emitted. In a previous wor...

We investigate Bayesian methods for optimal decoding of noisy or incompletely-observed spike trains. Information about neural identity or temporal resolution may be lost during spike detection and sorting, or spike times measured near the soma may be corrupted with noise due to stochastic membrane channel effects in the axon. We focus on neural encoding models in which the (discrete) neural sta...

Reduced models of neuronal activity such as integrate-and-fire models allow a description of neuronal dynamics in simple, intuitive terms and are easy to simulate numerically. We present a method to fit an integrate-and-fire-type model of neuronal activity, namely a modified version of the spike response model, to a detailed Hodgkin-Huxley-type neuron model driven by stochastic spike arrival. I...

Characterizing the information carried by neural populations in the brain requires accurate statistical models of neural spike responses. The negative-binomial distribution provides a convenient model for over-dispersed spike counts, that is, responses with greater-than-Poisson variability. Here we describe a powerful data-augmentation framework for fully Bayesian inference in neural models wit...

Spike train models are important for the development and calibration of data analysis methods and for the quantification of certain properties of the data. We study here the properties of a spike train model that can produce both oscillatory and non-oscillatory spike trains, faithfully reproducing the firing statistics of the original spiking data being modeled. Furthermore, using data recorded...

Classical experiments on spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) use a protocol based on pairs of presynaptic and postsynaptic spikes repeated at a given frequency to induce synaptic potentiation or depression. Therefore, standard STDP models have expressed the weight change as a function of pairs of presynaptic and postsynaptic spike. Unfortunately, those paired-based STDP models cannot accou...