Responses to transients in living and simulated neurons

This paper is concerned with synaptic coding when inputs to a neuron change over time. Experiments were performed on a living and simulated embodiment of a prototypical inhibitory synapse. These were used to test a simple model composed of a fixed delay preceding a nonlinear encoder. Based on these results, we present a qualitative model for phenomena previously observed in the living preparation, including hysteresis and dependence of discharge regularity on rate of change of presynaptic spike rate. As change is the rule rather than the exception in nature, understanding neurons responses to nonstationarity is essential for understanding their function.