Végh János, Berki Ádám József
Kalimános BT, 4028 Debrecen, Hungary.
Department of Neurology, Semmelweis University, 1085 Budapest, Hungary.
Entropy (Basel). 2022 Aug 5;24(8):1086. doi: 10.3390/e24081086.
Neuroscience extensively uses the information theory to describe neural communication, among others, to calculate the amount of information transferred in neural communication and to attempt the cracking of its coding. There are fierce debates on how information is represented in the brain and during transmission inside the brain. The neural information theory attempts to use the assumptions of electronic communication; despite the experimental evidence that the neural spikes carry information on non-discrete states, they have shallow communication speed, and the spikes' timing precision matters. Furthermore, in biology, the communication channel is active, which enforces an additional power bandwidth limitation to the neural information transfer. The paper revises the notions needed to describe information transfer in technical and biological communication systems. It argues that biology uses Shannon's idea outside of its range of validity and introduces an adequate interpretation of information. In addition, the presented time-aware approach to the information theory reveals pieces of evidence for the role of processes (as opposed to states) in neural operations. The generalized information theory describes both kinds of communication, and the classic theory is the particular case of the generalized theory.
神经科学广泛运用信息论来描述神经通信，其中包括计算神经通信中传递的信息量以及尝试破解其编码方式。关于信息在大脑中如何呈现以及在大脑内部传递过程中如何呈现，存在激烈的争论。神经信息论试图运用电子通信的假设；尽管有实验证据表明神经冲动携带关于非离散状态的信息，但其通信速度较慢，且冲动的时间精度很重要。此外，在生物学中，通信通道是活跃的，这对神经信息传递施加了额外的功率带宽限制。本文修正了描述技术和生物通信系统中信息传递所需的概念。它认为生物学在香农理论的有效范围之外运用了其思想，并引入了对信息的恰当解释。此外，所提出的信息论的时间感知方法揭示了过程（而非状态）在神经操作中作用的证据。广义信息论描述了这两种通信方式，而经典理论是广义理论的特殊情况。
