Neural coding

Neural coding (or neural representation) refers to the relationship between a stimulus and its respective neuronal responses, and the signalling relationships among networks of neurons in an ensemble. Action potentials, which act as the primary carrier of information in biological neural networks, are generally uniform regardless of the type of stimulus or the specific type of neuron. The simplicity of action potentials as a methodology of encoding information factored with the indiscriminate process of summation is seen as discontiguous with the specification capacity that neurons demonstrate at the presynaptic terminal, as well as the broad ability for complex neuronal processing and regional specialisation for which the brain-wide integration of such is seen as fundamental to complex derivations; such as intelligence, consciousness, complex social interaction, reasoning and motivation. As such, theoretical frameworks that describe encoding mechanisms of action potential sequences in relationship to observed patterns are seen as fundamental to neuroscientific understanding.