French A S, Torkkeli P H
Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Neurosci Lett. 1998 Feb 27;243(1-3):113-6. doi: 10.1016/s0304-3940(98)00110-4.
Action potentials are widely used to transmit information within nervous systems but information encoding and transmission rates by action potentials are poorly understood. In the absence of knowledge about encoding, most previous work has used signal-to-noise ratios to estimate information capacities. We used a mechanosensory neuron to transmit information by a simple encoding scheme that allowed us to measure the transmission rate directly. Using either mechanical or electrical stimulation, information was transmitted at rates up to 500 bits/s, higher than ever reported before for real action potentials. However, the maximum possible message length decreased strongly with transmission rate, from approximately infinite at 100 bits/s to approximately 100 ms at 500 bits/ s, probably due to ionic adaptation processes within the neuronal membrane.
动作电位在神经系统内被广泛用于传递信息，但人们对动作电位的信息编码和传输速率了解甚少。由于缺乏关于编码的知识，之前的大多数研究都使用信噪比来估计信息容量。我们使用一个机械感觉神经元，通过一种简单的编码方案来传输信息，这种方案使我们能够直接测量传输速率。使用机械或电刺激，信息的传输速率高达500比特/秒，这比之前报道的真实动作电位的速率都要高。然而，最大可能的消息长度随着传输速率的增加而大幅下降，从100比特/秒时的大约无限长降至500比特/秒时的大约100毫秒，这可能是由于神经元膜内的离子适应过程所致。
