ABSTRACT
Psychologists and philosophers deliberated about the source of human thinking and perceiving, Ramon y Cajal discovered the cellular nature of the brain. While the biology and biochemistry of the brain functions are not yet fully understood, it became consensus that neurons play the biggest role in information processing in our brains. Individual sensory neurons, after undergoing stimuli, produce a series of stereotyped action potentials, also referred to as spikes. Neurons are networked in a weighted directed graph, in which the connections are called synapses. The neuron’s output is then broadcast to all connected nodes in the network. The information transformed by the spiking neuron is often characterized by the firing rate of spikes or the timing of individual spikes. In the nervous system, firing a spike costs a neuron an amount of energy proportional to how far the spike must travel down the axon, because the transmission medium is dispersive and lossy.
