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Comment by tgbugs | Hacker News Reader

Rate coding vs temporal coding is literally a meme in neuroscience because the two camps seem to refuse to compromise.

Everyone else has realized that both happen depending on how that particular part of the nervous system works, or even what particular kind of information is flowing through it.

This title reads like it was written by a rate coder who woke up one day and was like "Woah, you mean ... there might be more to it than just averaging spike counts per unit time???"

edit: Hah, they are literally the first two headings in the wikipedia article on neural coding [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding

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I feel like the more you learn about neuroscience, the more you learn how precise and complex neural information processing is. For instance, there's evidence that at least some neurons "record" information about their activity in the form of RNA. Also the placement of synapses in the dendritic arbour matters, and some synapses can act like logic gates with respect to the synapses farther down the same branches.

I think there almost certainly must be neural behavior which codes fairly simply based on rate, but it's very difficult to believe that there isn't neural computation based on precise timing relationships.

> there's evidence that at least some neurons "record" information about their activity in the form of RNA

Source? I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence. Are you saying that neurons might use RNA as a sort of "long-term" memory of activation patterns? This seems really unlikely! But again, I'm not a neuroscientist.

Here are a couple articles:

https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(18)30901-2.pdf

https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/26121/

I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence

Changes to DNA would be the long term changes, not RNA. But yes, look up epigenetics, and especially DNA methylation.

This might be a reason why the immune system is kept outside from the brain.

I think it's also fascinating to learn about computation, sensing, reaction etc. in other cells, both within multicell organisms and when looking at single cell organisms.

There was an article on this that I don't know how to find again - the point being that neurons are not unique in their capacity for computation, they are only the most evolved formed of it.

Yeah I mean if you look at the structure of Neurons it's easy to understand them as an extremely optimized version of "normal" intercellular communication. I mean all a synapse really is is chemical signaling between two adjacent cells.

The structure of neurons allows them to achieve "adjacency" to other cells which would be far from one another in most tissues, and electrical transmission of the action potential just allows neurons to control that chemical signaling in a very precise and directed way.

First rule about sufficiently evolved systems: They're more interconnected and involved than you likely first expect.

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