Parallel Processing in Nervous Systems with Converging and Diverging Transmission

Nervous systems exhibit a remarkable convergence and divergence of signal traffic. In this paper we examine some general properties of such a system. We show how information can be processed and conserved in detail through overlapping receptive fields. We discuss the influence of receptive field size on economy of transmitting local vs. global information and we point out the advantages of convergence and divergence in the context of reliability.