Neurons can carry more than one signal at a time
Back in the early days of telecommunications, engineers devised a clever way to send multiple telephone calls through a single wire at the same time. Called time-division multiplexing, this technique rapidly switches between sending pieces of each message.
New research from Duke University shows that neurons in the brain may be capable of a similar strategy.
In an experiment examining how monkeys respond to sound, a team of neuroscientists and statisticians found that a single neuron can encode information from two different sounds by switching between the signal associated with one sound and the signal associated with the other sound.
“The question we asked is, how do neurons preserve information about two different stimuli in the world at one time?” said Jennifer Groh, professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience, and in the department of neurobiology at Duke.
“We found that there are periods of time when a given neuron responds to one stimulus, and other periods of time where it responds to the other,” Groh said. “They seem to be able to alternate between each one.”
The results may explain how the brain processes complex information from the world around us, and may also provide insight into some of our perceptual and cognitive limitations. The results appeared July 13 in Nature Communications. [Continue reading…]