Information processing in the brain

The ways by which information is encoded and processed in the brain are still largely unknown. In 1997, we have proposed that the mechanism of phase-locking among coupled limit-cycle oscillators, a phenomenon widely observed in in vitro recordings, could serve as the coding scheme, unifying rate- with temporal coding in a noise-robust way. In this project, we investigate how computation by means of phase-locking interfaces with the underlying network architecture, how this could be realistically implemented in biology, and in hardware. We develop measures for the information content in spike trains, for cortical computations in general and for the efficiency of phase-locked computation depending on its underlying architecture.