Chapter 1 Can We Predict Every Spike? Book chapter to appear in Spike Timing: Mechanisms and Function, Edited by Patricia M.

Is it possible to predict the spike times of a neuron with millisecond precision? In the classical picture of rate coding (Adrian, 1928), single spikes do not play a role, and the question would have to be answered negatively. For rate coding in a single-neuron, the relevant quantity to encode a stimulus such as pressure onto a touch sensor in the skin (Adrian, 1928) or presence of a light bar in the receptive field of a visual neuron (Hubel and Wiesel, 1959) is the number of spikes a neuron emits in a short time window of, e.g., 100ms. The timing of the spikes is considered as irrele-vant. However, over the last 20 years many researchers have shown that it is not only the temporally averaged firing rate that carries information about the stimulus, but also the exact timing of spikes. For example, spike timing has shown to be relevant to encode force amplitude and direction in touch sensors of the skin (Johansson and Birznieks, 2004) as well as the whole-field visual movements (Bialek et al., 1991) or object movement (Gollisch and Meister, 2008) in visual neurons. If spike timing is important, a whole series of questions arises: What is the preci-sion of spike timing if the same stimulus is repeated several times? Do spikes alway