Dear readers of bionet.neuroscience,
I'm involved in an interdisciplinary project where we try to model and simulate
biologically realistic neural networks (in invertebrates; stick insects, to be
more precise).
My interest lies in describing the patterns generated by single neurons of a
network. We transform simulated or actually recorded (real) and digitized
membrane potential traces into a symbolic behavioral description which is
represented as a tree structure. This tree representation accounts for
interesting phenomena like occurences of spikes, EPSPs, IPSPs and (nested)
repetitions of these plus additional information (duration, amplitude,
frequency,...). The tree representation can be further processed by a computer
system. Currently we try to describe neural activity in terms of (tree) grammars
that are to be induced by presenting the induction algorithm a couple of
activity patterns a neurophysiologist considers as similar. The induced grammar
defines their common language and eventually this language may be a
classification basis for neural behavior of single neurons. It may be
questionable though, if a single neuron really encodes a significant amount of
information or if the focus should be more on the behavior of neuronal ensembles
or even areas in the brain. But I think this is a question of scale and
investigations on every level are justified and may contribute to a better
understanding of the "real thing".
So here goes my question: Does anybody have pointers to publications of similar
syntactical approaches to the description of neural behavior (besides chaos
theory, statistical approaches, hidden markov models etc.). For me, the idea of
a neuron "speaking a language" in a certain context seems really appealing...
Please let me know about any references that come to your mind. Thanks very much
in advance.
Regards
-- oliver.
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Oliver Wendel
AG Kuenstliche Intelligenz/Expertensysteme
FB Informatik
Universitaet Kaiserslautern
Postfach 3049
67653 Kaiserslautern
Tel.: + 49 631 205 3327
Fax: + 49 631 205 3357
email: wendel at informatik.uni-kl.de
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-- oliver.