Neural Coding of Natural Stimuli: Information at Sub-Millisecond Resolution

Sensory information about the outside world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant to the function of the brain. We revisit this issue, using the motion-sensitive neurons of the fly visual system as a test case. Our experimental methods allow us to deliver more nearly natural visual stimuli, comparable to those which flies encounter in free, acrobatic flight. New mathematical methods allow us to draw more reliable conclusions about the information content of neural responses even when the set of possible responses is very large. We find that significant amounts of visual information are represented by details of the spike train at millisecond and sub-millisecond precision, even though the sensory input has a correlation time of ∼55 ms; different patterns of spike timing represent distinct motion trajectories, and the absolute timing of spikes points to particular features of these trajectories with high precision. Finally, the efficiency of our entropy estimator makes it possible to uncover features of neural coding relevant for natural visual stimuli: first, the system's information transmission rate varies with natural fluctuations in light intensity, resulting from varying cloud cover, such that marginal increases in information rate thus occur even when the individual photoreceptors are counting on the order of one million photons per second. Secondly, we see that the system exploits the relatively slow dynamics of the stimulus to remove coding redundancy and so generate a more efficient neural code.Author Summary: Neurons communicate by means of stereotyped pulses, called action potentials or spikes, and a central issue in systems neuroscience is to understand this neural coding. Here we study how sensory information is encoded in sequences of spikes, using a combination of novel theoretical and experimental techniques. With motion detection in the blowfly as a model system, we perform experiments in an environment maximally similar to the natural one. We report a number of unexpected, striking observations about the structure of the neural code in this system: First, the timing of spikes is important with a precision roughly two orders of magnitude greater than the temporal dynamics of the stimulus. Second, the fly goes a long way to utilize the redundancy in the stimulus in order to optimize the neural code and encode more refined features than would be possible otherwise. This implies that the neural code, even in low-level vision, may be significantly context dependent.