USA All estimations for the quantity of information encoded within a neuron's spike train depend upon the timescale with which the timing of its spikes are assumed to represent its input signal. Intrinsic temporal precision ranged from 50 to 100 microseconds for this set of cells. This variation manifests as noise in the transmission channel, and imposes a constraint on the capacity of the channel. We find that the variance of spike transmission time ranges between 25 and 100 microseconds. This is compatible with the hypothesis that transmission noise is a significant contributing factor to encoding noise, and that transmission noise imposes a lower bound on the encoding temporal precision.
Natural time scales for neural encoding.