How to Describe Neuronal Activity: Spikes, Rates, or Assemblies?

Abstract

What is the 'correct' theoretical description of neuronal activity? The analysis of the dynamics of a globally connected network of spiking neurons (the Spike Response Model) shows that a descrip(cid:173) tion by mean firing rates is possible only if active neurons fire in(cid:173) coherently. If firing occurs coherently or with spatio-temporal cor(cid:173) relations, the spike structure of the neural code becomes relevant. Alternatively, neurons can be gathered into local or distributed en(cid:173) sembles or 'assemblies'. A description based on the mean ensemble activity is, in principle, possible but the interaction between differ(cid:173) ent assemblies becomes highly nonlinear. A description with spikes should therefore be preferred.

Cite

Text

Gerstner and van Hemmen. "How to Describe Neuronal Activity: Spikes, Rates, or Assemblies?." Neural Information Processing Systems, 1993.

Markdown

[Gerstner and van Hemmen. "How to Describe Neuronal Activity: Spikes, Rates, or Assemblies?." Neural Information Processing Systems, 1993.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/1993/gerstner1993neurips-describe/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{gerstner1993neurips-describe,
  title     = {{How to Describe Neuronal Activity: Spikes, Rates, or Assemblies?}},
  author    = {Gerstner, Wulfram and van Hemmen, J. Leo},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {1993},
  pages     = {463-470},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/1993/gerstner1993neurips-describe/}
}