Spike Mechanisms

In simulations, the level of detail at which spike mechanisms are simulated can vary greatly. You could choose to simulate a complex conductance-bsased model like the famous Hodgkin-Huxley sodium-potassium mechanism, or you could emit spikes randomly at a mean rate proportional to the input.

In this program, we use mostly a simplified Integrate-and-File (IF) mechanism. We may also be using a Poisson spike rate mechanism.

In either case, the results are spike events that you can hear on the speaker.

Spike rate encoding

Because the number of cells is so small, the cell outputs are not taken to be the actual spikes, but rather the instantaneous spike rate.

This spike rate is the reciprocal of the time between the last two spikes, lowpass filtered with some time constant of about 100ms. It is this value that you can observe in the activity bar .