Imagine a packed room full of people talking in loud voices. There may be a lot of 'noise' in the room, however as long as you approach a certain group their words start to become more and more clear. If it is too much 'noise' you may see when everyone speaks, however you may understand only one person -the closest person in front of you. Therefore, if the signal is attenuated the distance between you and the source of information is important.
(i)In order to understand the language, the words need to be understood
(ii) How fast someone speaks, the interval between words is meaningless.
(iii) Some specialization may occur (e.g John likes to tell the story regarding a trip in Hawaii)
(iV) However, Joe will not always tell the same story. Seeing that Joe is speaking fast, it does not necessarily mean that he tells the story about his trip in Hawaii.
In case of electrophysiological recordings, the neurons are the people, the 'room' is the brain and the electrodes record electrical messages. Every neuron 'speaks' in less than a millisecond during action potential generation. The action potentials are the meaningful "words"
In order to understand the neuron's language (meaning, semantics) one needs to listen these 'words' with adequate techniques. The distance between the electrodes and the source of information is critical to perceive the changes in APs shape. To understand the 'words' one needs to measure the variability of action potential waveforms, compute spike directivity.
Since different fragments of memories are stored in the neuron, sometimes the neuron responds to certain properties of an object/ behavior however with each spike it may provide different details, the response may change, can be different -context dependency. Since the variability of spike outcome is not included in the temporal measures (ISI, firing rate) the outcome of temporal coding is ambiguous and leads to controversies.
Therefore, counting how many 'words' it speaks in a certain amount of time (firing rate) or the interval between them (interspike interval, ISI) ignores the fundamental content of the discourse ---- the semantics.
Can anyone understand a scientific talk if the main focus is on counting the number of words (firing rate) or the time interval between words (ISI)?
