Abstract

We test the hypothesis that the neuronal spike generation mechanism is an analog-to-digital (AD) converter encoding rectified low-pass filtered summed synaptic currents into a spike train linearly decodable in postsynaptic neurons. Faithful encoding of an analog waveform by a binary signal requires that the spike generation mechanism has a sampling rate exceeding the Nyquist rate of the analog signal. Such oversampling is consistent with the experimental observation that the precision of the spikegeneration mechanism is an order of magnitude greater than the cut -off frequency of low-pass filtering in dendrites. Additional improvement in the coding accuracy may be achieved by noise-shaping, a technique used in signal processing. If noise-shaping were used in neurons, it would reduce coding error relative to Poisson spike generator for frequencies below Nyquist by introducing correlations into spike times. By using experimental data from three different classes of neurons, we demonstrate that biological neurons utilize noise-shaping. Therefore, the spike-generation mechanism can be viewed as an oversampling and noise-shaping AD converter.