Reliability of Neuronal Responses

Woody Allen once observed that “80% of success is showing up.” In other words, reliability matters, and nowhere more than in the nervous system. But neuronal responses vary from moment to moment. Identical stimuli delivered to sensory neurons never elicit identical responses on repeated trials, and the signals carried by single neurons are therefore imperfect representations of the input signals that give rise to them. The performance of the nervous system is ultimately limited by the fidelity with which signals can be relayed from one neuron to the next, so understanding the nature and causes of this variability is crucial to understanding neural computation.