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