<story><title>Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-kind-of-information-coding-seen-in-the-human-brain-20210707/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexmorley</author><text>&amp;gt; For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength of radiation.&lt;p&gt;This hasn&amp;#x27;t been true for at least 20 years. There&amp;#x27;s a classic paper showing evidence of this in 1993 (O&amp;#x27;Keefe and Reece) in rats. And has been an active area of discussion both before and since. (Note that it&amp;#x27;s not to say that rate isn&amp;#x27;t important, but as a community no one has beleived that all the information would be encoded in rate for many years)&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s lots of good explainers here that link to relevant research: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scholarpedia.org&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;Encyclopedia:Computational_neuroscience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scholarpedia.org&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;Encyclopedia:Computation...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nocturnial</author><text>They mentioned this in the 3rd paragraph: &amp;quot;This temporal firing phenomenon is well documented in certain brain areas of rats, but the new study and others suggest it might be far more widespread in mammalian brains.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-kind-of-information-coding-seen-in-the-human-brain-20210707/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexmorley</author><text>&amp;gt; For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength of radiation.&lt;p&gt;This hasn&amp;#x27;t been true for at least 20 years. There&amp;#x27;s a classic paper showing evidence of this in 1993 (O&amp;#x27;Keefe and Reece) in rats. And has been an active area of discussion both before and since. (Note that it&amp;#x27;s not to say that rate isn&amp;#x27;t important, but as a community no one has beleived that all the information would be encoded in rate for many years)&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s lots of good explainers here that link to relevant research: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scholarpedia.org&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;Encyclopedia:Computational_neuroscience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scholarpedia.org&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;Encyclopedia:Computation...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdp2021</author><text>&amp;quot;Scholarpedia [.org] : the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia (where knowledge is curated by communities of experts).&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, thank you, thank you.&lt;p&gt;This fills an important gap.</text></comment>