A Neuron’s Sense of Timing Encodes Information in the Human Brain

A Neuron’s Sense of Timing Encodes Information in the Human Brain
We like to think of brains as computers: A physical system that processes inputs and spits out outputs. But, obviously, what’s between your ears bears little resemblance to your laptop.
Computer scientists know the intimate details of how computers store and process information because they design and build them. But neuroscientists didn’t build brains, which makes them a bit like a piece of alien technology they’ve found and are trying to reverse engineer.
At this point, researchers have catalogued the components fairly well. We know the brain is a vast and intricate network of cells called neurons that communicate by way of electrical and chemical signals. What’s harder to figure out is how this network makes sense of the world.
To do that, scientists try to tie behavior to activity in the brain by listening to the chatter of its neurons firing. If neurons in a region get rowdy when a person is eating chocolate, well, those cells might be processing taste or directing chewing. This method has mostly focused on the frequency at which neurons fire—that is, how often they fire in a given period of time.
But frequency alone is an imprecise measure. For years, research in rats has suggested that when neurons fire relative to their peers—during navigation of spaces in particular—may also encode information. This process, in which the timing of some neurons grows increasingly out of step with their neighbors, is called “phase precession.”....

URL/Links:
https://singularityhub.com/2021/07/11/a-neurons-sense-of-timing-encodes-information-in-the-human-brain/