Signal processing and control problems in the brain

W focus on the problem of representing an analog signal with a spike train, a representation commonly associated with a population of neurons. In the process of perception and control, the associated analog signals are believed to be encoded by a population of spiking neurons wherein the spikes are responsible for conveying the encoded information from one cell to another. Following prior work of Eilasmith and Anderson (1999, 2000), we describe how a collection of spike trains might encode analog signals. Implementation of a suitable decoder (filter) is shown to produce a reasonably good reconstruction of the encoded analog signal.