ABSTRACT
Is it possible to predict the spike times of a neuron with millisecond precision? In the classical picture of rate coding (Adrian, 1928), single spikes do not play a role, and the question would have to be answered negatively. For rate coding in a single neuron, the relevant quantity to encode a stimulus such as pressure onto a touch sensor in the skin (Adrian, 1928) or presence of a light bar in the receptive eld of a visual neuron (Hubel and Wiesel, 1959) is the number of spikes a neuron emits in a short time window of, for example, 100 ms. The timing of the spikes is considered as irrelevant. However, over the last 20 years, many researchers have shown that it is not only the temporally averaged ring rate that carries information about the stimulus, but also the exact timing of spikes. For example, spike timing has shown to be relevant to encode force amplitude and direction in touch sensors of the skin (Johansson and Birznieks, 2004) as well as the whole-eld visual movements (Bialek et al., 1991) or object movement (Gollisch and Meister, 2008) in visual neurons.
