Energy and information in Hodgkin-Huxley neurons

Abstract

The generation of spikes by neurons is energetically a costly process and the evaluation of the metabolic energy required to maintain the signalling activity of neurons a challenge of practical interest. Neuron models are frequently used to represent the dynamics of real neurons but hardly ever to evaluate the electrochemical energy required to maintain that dynamics. This paper discusses the interpretation of a Hodgkin-Huxley circuit as an energy model for real biological neurons and uses it to evaluate the consumption of metabolic energy in the transmission of information between neurons coupled by electrical synapses, i.e. gap junctions. We show that for a single postsynaptic neuron maximum energy efficiency, measured in bits of mutual information per ATP molecule consumed, requires maximum energy consumption. On the contrary, for groups of parallel postsynaptic neurons we determine values of the synaptic conductance at which the energy efficiency of the transmission presents clear maxima at relatively very low values of metabolic energy consumption. Contrary to what it could be expected best performance occurs at low energy cost.

This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to technical issues

References in corpus (2)

• Energy efficiency of information transmission by electrically coupled neurons
• Stochastic Pooling Networks

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Energy demands of diverse spiking cells from the neocortex, hippocampus, and thalamus
• The Optimal Size of Stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley Neuronal Systems for Maximal Energy Efficiency in Coding of Pulse Signals
• Metabolic efficiency with fast spiking in the squid axon
• Temperature Effects on Information Capacity and Energy Efficiency of Hodgkin-Huxley Neuron