Transduction of temporal patterns by single neurons

As our ability to communicate by Morse code illustrates, nervous systems can produce motor outputs, and identify sensory inputs, based on temporal patterning alone. Although this ability is central to a wide range of sensory and motor tasks, the ways in which nervous systems represent temporal patterns are not well understood. I show here that individual neurons of the lobster pyloric network can integrate rhythmic patterned input over the long times (hundreds of milliseconds) characteristic of many behaviorally relevant patterns, and that their firing delays vary as a graded function of the pattern's temporal character. These neurons directly transduce temporal patterns into a neural code, and constitute a novel biological substrate for temporal pattern detection and production. The combined activities of several such neurons can encode simple rhythmic patterns, and I provide a model illustrating how this could be achieved.