Department of Physics, Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Physics of Living Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Phys Rev E. 2016 Dec;94(6-1):060101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.060101. Epub 2016 Dec 7.
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to generation and within an organism's lifetime. How can organisms get by by hard coding the number of sensory neurons? We approach this question using rate-distortion theory. A combination of simulation and theory suggests that when environments are large, the rate-distortion function-a proxy for material costs, timing delays, and energy requirements-depends only on coarse-grained environmental statistics that are expected to change on evolutionary, rather than ontogenetic, time scales.
对于许多生物体来说，感觉神经元的数量在发育过程中就已经基本确定，此时还没有强烈的环境线索。尽管事实上，环境在代际之间和生物的一生中都会剧烈波动。生物体如何通过硬编码感觉神经元的数量来适应环境呢？我们使用率失真理论来解决这个问题。模拟和理论的结合表明，当环境较大时，率失真函数（一种物质成本、时间延迟和能量需求的代理）仅取决于预期在进化而不是个体发育时间尺度上发生变化的粗粒度环境统计信息。
