Synaptic Transmission: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

Details Synaptic Transmission: An Information-Theoretic Perspective Synaptic Transmission: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

1998-09-22

arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0309030v1

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10, Michael I. Jordan, Michael J. Kearns and Sara Solla (eds.), 1997

Biology

Quantitative Biology

Neurons and Cognition

7 pages, 4 figures, NIPS97 proceedings: neuroscience. Originally submitted to the neuro-sys archive which was never publicly a

Scientific paper

Here we analyze synaptic transmission from an information-theoretic perspective. We derive closed-form expressions for the lower-bounds on the capacity of a simple model of a cortical synapse under two explicit coding paradigms. Under the ``signal estimation'' paradigm, we assume the signal to be encoded in the mean firing rate of a Poisson neuron. The performance of an optimal linear estimator of the signal then provides a lower bound on the capacity for signal estimation. Under the ``signal detection'' paradigm, the presence or absence of the signal has to be detected. Performance of the optimal spike detector allows us to compute a lower bound on the capacity for signal detection. We find that single synapses (for empirically measured parameter values) transmit information poorly but significant improvement can be achieved with a small amount of redundancy.

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