Biologically inspired electronics leads to highe...( rison to many of the signals they need ...),Health

rison to many of the signals they need to encode - a pitched baseball, for example, is in the "hitting zone" for only a few milliseconds, whereas individual neurons often take ten milliseconds or more between firings. Despite this discrepancy in timing, major leaguers such as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit home runs regularly.

The researchers hypothesized that a more efficient flow of information is effected in neuronal networks by inhibitory coupling - a process through which activation of one neuron momentarily suppresses the level of activity in other neurons in the network. Inhibitory coupling reduces the clumping of information, avoiding information traffic jams that both make it difficult to "see" the information of interest and slow down the system. By connecting elements in this way the researchers were able to similarly smooth the flow of information and identify and shift the noise, or unwanted information, from the bandwidth of interest to higher frequencies where it can be filtered out.

The next step, according to Mar, is to take the theoretical results of this investigation and begin to apply it in actual devices to bring higher fidelity into a new generation of biologically inspired electronics.

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Contact: Joan Schwartz
joschwar@bu.edu
617-353-4626
Boston University
1-Sep-1999

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