Poisson-Like Neuronal Firing Due to Multiple Synfire Chains in Simultaneous Action

Abstract

The irregularity of neuronal firing times is commonly interpreted as being due to noise⁶. Here, an alternative approach is taken to show that even in a completely deterministic model — without any noise — neuronal firing times might appear random. This can be achieved in an attractor model with spiking neurons where the limit cycles are complex spatio—temporal spiking patterns also called synfire chains^l. Simultaneous activation of several synfire chains can lead to arbitrarily complex-looking spike patterns at the single neuron level. In addition, a learning rule is presented that allows to store general spatio—temporal spiking patterns.