Spike

The first scientific model of a spiking neuron was proposed by Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley in 1952.

This model describes how action potentials are initiated and propagated. Spikes, however are not generally transmitted directly between neurons, communication requires the exchange of chemical substances in the synaptic gap, called neurotransmitters.

The complexity and variability of biological models have resulted in various neuron models, such as the integrate-and-fire (1907), FitzHugh-Nagumo (1961-1962) and Hindmarsh-Rose model (1984).

From the information theory point of view, the problem is to propose a model that explains how information is encoded and decoded by a series of trains of pulses, i.e., action potentials. Thus, one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience is to determine if neurons communicated by a rate code or by a pulse code.

Early results with spiking neural models suggested that by using temporal coding, networks of spiking neurons may gain more computational power than traditional neural networks. It was also suggested that, under certain conditions, any multilayered perceptron can be simulated closely by a network consisting of spiking neurons.