Michael Recce Chapter 4

An organism which interacts with its environment must be capable of receiving sensory input from the environment. It has to process the sensory information, recognize food sources or predators, and take appropriate actions. The difficulty of these tasks is appreciated, if one tries to program a small robot to do the same thing: It turns out to be a challenging endeavor. Yet animals perform these tasks with apparent ease. Their astonishingly good performance is due to a neural system or ‘brain’which has been optimized over the time courses of evolution. Even though a lot of detailed information about neurons and their connections is available by now, one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience is unsolved: What is the code used by the neurons? Do neurons communicate by a ‘rate code’or a ‘pulse code’?