Noise reduction in the nervous system. Focus on 'Enhancement of ITD coding within the initial stages of the auditory pathway'.

摘要

A frustrating reality of neuroscience is the tendency of neurons to respond in different ways to repeated presentations of identical stimuli. This variability might arise from several different sources, but to some extent, particularly at the level of sensory transduction, it is noise in the purest sense. In principle, the effects of noise can be mitigated by either averaging across time or across a population, or prior knowledge (Faisal et al. 2008). While these mechanisms are undoubtedly in use, there are few pails of the nervous system where noise reduction is the only thing happening. Instead, neurons presumably employ these noise reduction mechanisms in the course of performing some other computation. Where noise reduction as a computation by itself is found, it seems to occur primarily in the earliest stages of sensory processing: for example, in retinal ganglion cells (Balboa and Grzywacz 2000; Warrant 1999) or in the cochlear nucleus (Joris et al. 1994a,b) or following the electroreceptor primary afferents in electric fish (Carr et al. 1986).