Poisson-like neuronal firing due to multiple synfire chains in simultaneous action

The irregularity of neuronal firing times is commonly interpreted as being due to noise6. Here, an alternative approach is taken to show that even in a completely deterministic model — without any noise — neuronal firing times might appear random. This can be achieved in an attractor model with spiking neurons where the limit cycles are complex spatio—temporal spiking patterns also called synfire chainsl. Simultaneous activation of several synfire chains can lead to arbitrarily complex-looking spike patterns at the single neuron level. In addition, a learning rule is presented that allows to store general spatio—temporal spiking patterns.