Stimulus-Dependent Frequency Modulation of Information Transmission in Neural Systems

Neural oscillations are universal phenomena and can be observed at different levels of neural systems, from single neuron to macroscopic brain. The frequency of those oscillations are related to the brain functions. However, little is know about how the oscillating frequency of neural system affects neural information transmission in them. In this paper, we investigated how the signal processing in single neuron is modulated by subthreshold membrane potential oscillation generated by upstream rhythmic neural activities. We found that the high frequency oscillations facilitate the transferring of strong signals, whereas slow oscillations the weak signals. Though the capacity of information convey for weak signal is low in single neuron, it is greatly enhanced when weak signals are transferred by multiple pathways with different oscillation phases. We provided a simple phase plane analysis to explain the mechanism for this stimulus-dependent frequency modulation in the leakage integrate-and-fire neuron model. Those results provided a basic understanding of how the brain could modulate its information processing simply through oscillating frequency.