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NeuWrite West -- Ask a Neuroscientist: What's a spike train?

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To understand spike trains, let us first take a look at spikes. Our brains have about a hundred billion neurons that fire signals to communicate with each other all the time. These signals are electrochemical in nature, and travel from the cell body of a neuron through its transport stalk or the axon, to the next neuron – similar to passing the baton in a relay race. Every such firing signal is referred to as a spike, or an action potential. Spikes are produced in response to stimuli or spontaneously, and each spike typically lasts for 1 millisecond. A spike train is simply a combinatorial sequence of spikes and silences. A popular way to think of spike trains is as a digital sequence of information: 1 for a spike, and 0 for no spike. For example, an encoded spike train structure could look like 001111101101. The first two 0s represent the latency time between the stimulus presentation and the first spike. Spike trains can be induced by physical sensory stimuli such as vision, touch, s

“ What is a spike train? How is a spike train generated (i.e. does it have to be caused from a constant stimuli)? How long does a typical spike train last? ” - Justin Hi Justin, In a nutshell, spike trains are the language in which the external world is encoded into our brains. To understand spike trains, let us first take a look at spikes. Our brains have about a hundred billion neurons that fire signals to communicate with each other all the time. These signals are electrochemical in nature, and travel from the cell body of a neuron through its transport stalk or the axon, to the next neuron

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