Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 14: Posters: Neurophysics

BP 14.1: Poster

Monday, March 16, 2015, 17:30–19:30, Poster A

Frequency modulated signal transmission in neurons — •Tim Herfurth and Tatjana Tchumatchenko — Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Max-von-Laue-Str. 4, 60438 Frankfurt/M

During information/signal processing in neural networks aside from the actual signal background activity is always present and is commonly denoted as noise. Mechanisms of neural coding and decoding have to account for that and still reliably transmit information within the network. Traditionally, spontaneous synaptic and background activity have been treated as additive noise. Alternatively, amplitude modulations of the noise by the signal have been proposed, effectively coding in the variance channel. In this work we suggest and present closed form expressions for another kind of signal modulation: frequency modulation (FM). Here, the signal modulates the noise by linear frequency modulation. The concept is well known, e.g. from communication techniques. However, we present a representation that incorporates arbitrary forms of input signals and noise, define a signal-to-noise ratio and show consequences for statistics and mutual information of the FM channel.