On June 21, I will spend ten minutes discussing some important
statistical results related to Odelia's presentation last week, and
then spend the rest of the hour talking about something completely
different:
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Statistical properties of spike trains: universal and
stimulus-dependent aspects
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N. Brenner, O. Agam, W. Bialek, R. de Ruyter van Steveninck
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Statistical properties of spike trains measured from a sensory neuron
in-vivo are studied experimentally and theoretically. Experiments are
performed on an identified neuron in the visual system of the
blowfly. It is shown that the spike trains exhibit universal behavior
over short time, modulated by a stimulus-dependent envelope over long
time. A model of the neuron as a nonlinear oscillator driven by noise
and an external stimulus, is suggested to account for these
results. The model enables a theoretic distinction of the effects of
internal neuronal properties from effects of external stimulus
properties, and their identification in the measured spike trains. The
universal regime is characterized by one dimensionless parameter,
representing the internal degree of irregularity, which is determined
both by the sensitivity of the neuron and by the properties of the
noise. The envelope is related in a simple way to properties of the
input stimulus as seen through nonlinearity of the neural
response. Explicit formulas are derived for different statistical
properties in both the universal and the stimulus-dependent
regimes. These formulas are in very good agreement with the data in
both regimes.
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get the paper <a href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/9902061">here</a>.