MATHEMATICAL-MODELING OF WEAKLY NONLINEAR PULSES IN A RETINAL NEURON

In the nervous system, most processing of information and its transmis sion over short distances occurs in dendrites and short axons whose me mbranes are weakly nonlinear. We discuss the behaviour of a particular cell, the photoreceptor cell of the honey-bee drone, for which the no rmal physiological input is well defined. In this cell, weakly nonline ar membrane properties (resulting from the presence of voltage-gated s odium channels) amplify and speed up small voltage pulses in a way tha t should be more useful to the animal than would be conversion into st rongly nonlinear action potentials. Three different computational meth ods are compared for solving the partial differential equations that m odel this system.