Essential roles of noise in neural coding and in studies of neural coding

We present examples of results from our studies of auditory primary afferen t nerve fibers and populations of such fibers in the frog and gerbil. We ta ke advantage of the natural dithering effect of internal noise, where it is sufficient, to construct highly predictive descriptive models (based on th e Wiener series with kernels derived from white-noise analysis). Where the internal noise is insufficient, we enhance dithering by applying external a coustic noise together with our stimuli. Using acoustic noise as a backgrou nd sound, orthogonal to the stimulus waveform, we show that under some circ umstances such background sound can enhance the ability of individual fiber s and populations of fibers to encode the stimulus waveform. (C) 2000 Elsev ier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.