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Is there signal in the noise?

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 750–751 (2014)Cite this article

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A study now shows that variability in neuronal responses in the visual system mainly arises from slow fluctuations in excitability, presumably caused by factors of nonsensory origin, such as arousal, attention or anesthesia.

Responses of cortical neurons appear to be notoriously noisy. Even with repeated presentations of the same visual stimulus, we rarely observe the same spike train twice. This high degree of variability, which is often correlated amongst pairs of neurons, has fascinated neuroscientists for decades. Is it noise, arising from stochastic features of neural architecture, or does it reflect meaningful, yet complicated, signals that we simply do not understand? Thus far, it is still not entirely clear what causes the observed neuronal variability. Moreover, we do not even have simple, parsimonious models to describe it appropriately. A study by Goris, Movshon and Simoncelli in this issue of Nature Neuroscience fills this latter gap and proposes a simple conceptual model that provides a new view on cortical response variability.

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Figure 1: The modulated Poisson model and the law of total variance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alexander S. Ecker and Andreas S. Tolias are in the Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA, and the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany.,

    Alexander S Ecker & Andreas S Tolias

  2. Alexander S. Ecker is also at the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.,

    Alexander S Ecker

  3. Andreas S. Tolias is also in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA.,

    Andreas S Tolias

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  1. Alexander S Ecker
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Correspondence to Alexander S Ecker or Andreas S Tolias.

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Ecker, A., Tolias, A. Is there signal in the noise?. Nat Neurosci 17, 750–751 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3722

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