The Energy Assessment Of Neural Information Coding

In the nervous system, the coding and processing of neural information is largely achieved by the coordination of neuronal population activities among in large number of neurons, known as the neuronal population encoding. The scientific community generally considered that the information is mainly carried by the action potentials of the neurons. Although people have a deep knowledge of the formation and propagation of action potential, so far we still do not have a integral and accurate understanding of the patterns of action potentials coding on neural information and the amount of information carried by spike series. Neural information coding has become one of the most important, the most fundamental and the most popular research directions on neural information processing and brain science. Great attention has been paid for a long time by cognitive neuroscientists, computational neuroscientists, and artificial intelligence scientists all over the world. And therefore they invented a series of neural information coding theories and several important methods on neural coding analysis and achieved a number of important research results.All activities of the organism and energy usage are closely related. So is the information coding in the nervous system. It provides a new way for us to study the neural information coding, that is, we can explore the internal mechanism of the information coding from the perspective of energy. With the experimental data of American neuroscientists, a lot of evidence show that in cerebral cortex of the mammalian, neural signal transmission is a costly process of energy expenditure, indicating that the neural signal encoding and energy metabolism are closely linked. However, what rules do the neuronal activities on energy utilization in the nervous system fellow? What is the intrinsic relationship between information coding and neural energy? These are questions we want to explore and resolve.This paper first introduces several common neural information coding theories and discusses their characteristics respectively. Then, we also introduce some common research methods in the study of neural coding and how to use the minimum mutual information principle and the maximum entropy principle to analyses neural information coding. And we give a brief introduction about the basic methods and principles of information decoding. Besides, with the establishment of appropriate neuron model, we try to explore the internal rules of the neural information coding from the aspect of energy and discuss the relation between neural information and neural energy. Finally, we also investigate the characteristics of the spikes and their energy consuming changes in different network structure of neurons under the coupling conditions. We try to reveal the performance rules of information of neural coding from the energy aspects in the neuronal population activities.