Reliability and information transmission in spiking neurons
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Updated: Aug 12, 2026

Optical Recording of Suprathreshold Neural Activity with Single-cell and Single-spike Resolution
Published on: September 5, 2012
Abstract:
Spiking neurons encode continuous, time-varying signals in sequences of identical action potentials. Relatively simple algorithms allow one to 'decode' this neural representation of sensory data to estimate the input signals. Decoding experiments provide a quantitative characterization of information transmission and computational reliability under real-time conditions. The results of these studies show that neural coding and computation in several systems approach fundamental physical and informational theoretic limits to performance.
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