Information theory
The development of the Barlow's hypothesis was influenced by information theory introduced by Claude Shannon only a decade before. Information theory provides the mathematical framework for analyzing communication systems. It formally defines concepts such as information, channel capacity, and redundancy. Barlow's model treats the sensory pathway as a communication channel where neuronal spiking is an efficient code for representing sensory signals. The spiking code aims to maximize available channel capacity by minimizing the redundancy between representational units. H. Barlow was not the very first one to introduce the idea: it already appears in a 1954 article written by F. Attneave.