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Abstract:
Cortical neurons fire in a highly irregular manner, suggesting that their input is tightly balanced and changes in presynaptic firing rate are encoded primarily in the variance of the postsynaptic currents. Here we show that such balance has a surprising effect on information transmission: Synaptic unreliability – which is ubiquitous in cortex and usually thought to impair neural communication – actually increases the information rate. We show that the beneficial effect of noise is based on a very general mechanism which contrary to stochastic resonance does not rely on a threshold nonlinearity.
