[Simulation of spontaneous discharge and short-term adaptation in acoustic nerve fibers]

A model for firing of the auditory nerve fibres was carried out on a general purpose digital computer. In the model a noise with small correlation time and with assigned standard deviation (when modeling a spontaneous discharge) or a sum of a noise and a determinated signal (when modeling an elicited discharge) is compared with incremental threshold. When the threshold is exceeded a spike occurs and the threshold is increased. The threshold qualitative properties and quantitative values were chosen in a way to provide the most reliable patterns of spontaneous discharge, according to the literature data obtained from the cat's auditory nerve. When stimulated by tone-bursts the model reveals intrinsic ability of mimicking the phenomena of discharge rate short-term adaptation. Thus according to our model the short-term adaptation is entirely due to the properties of the incremental threshold.