Extreme degeneracy of inputs in firing a neuron leads to loss of information when neuronal firing is examined

  Neuroscience, Neurosearch Center, 76 Henry St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27228v3
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Biophysics, Computational Biology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Disorders, Computational Science
Keywords
Degeneracy, Action potential, Axonal spike, Neuronal firing, Information storage, Internal sensation, First-person properties, Dendritic spine, Dendritic spike, Mind
Copyright
© 2018 Vadakkan
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Vadakkan KI. 2018. Extreme degeneracy of inputs in firing a neuron leads to loss of information when neuronal firing is examined. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27228v3

Abstract

Possible combinations of inputs in the order of 10100 can fire (axonal spike or action potential) a neuron that has nearly 104 inputs (dendritic spines). This extreme degeneracy of inputs that can fire a neuron is associated with significant loss of information when examination is limited to neuronal firing. Excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) propagating from remote locations on the dendritic tree attenuate as they arrive at the axon hillock depending on the distance they propagate. Moreover, some EPSPs from remote locations will not even reach the axonal hillock. In this context, an operational mechanism at the location of origin of these EPSPs is necessary to preserve information for efficient storage. A similar mechanism is also expected at the location of origin of EPSPs generating dendritic spikes.

Author Comment

Version 3 has few minor sentence re-wordings to clarify and read better. Minor correction on calculations of probabilities were made. A new subsection titled "Firing of a group of neurons" is added explaining how this observation can be re-interpreted in the light of the present work.