Transformation of stimulus correlations by the retina

Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons seem to waste neural resources but can carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To assess how the retina negotiates this tradeoff, we measured simultaneous responses from populations of ganglion cells presented with natural and artificial stimuli that varied greatly in correlation structure. We found that pairwise correlations in the retinal output remained similar across stimuli with widely different spatio-temporal correlations including white noise and natural movies. Meanwhile, purely spatial correlations tended to increase correlations in the retinal response. Responding to more correlated stimuli, ganglion cells had faster temporal kernels and tended to have stronger surrounds. These properties of individual cells, along with gain changes that opposed changes in effective contrast at the ganglion cell input, largely explained the similarity of pairwise correlations across stimuli where receptive field measurements were possible.Comment: author list corrected in metadat

Grassmann Variables and Pseudoclassical Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

The concept of a propagator is useful and is a well-known object in diffusion NMR experiments. Here, we investigate the related concept; the propagator for the magnetisation or the Green's function of the Torrey-Bloch equations. The magnetisation propagator is constructed by defining functions such as the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian and using these to define a path integral. It is shown that the equations of motion derived from the Lagrangian produce complex-valued trajectories (classical paths) and it is conjectured that the end-points of these trajectories are real-valued. The complex nature of the trajectories also suggests that the spin degrees of freedom are also encoded into the trajectories and this idea is explored by explicitly modeling the spin or precessing magnetisation by anticommuting Grassmann variables. A pseudoclassical Lagrangian is constructed by combining the diffusive (bosonic) Lagrangian with the Grassmann (fermionic) Lagrangian, and performing the path integral over the Grassmann variables recovers the original Lagrangian that was used in the construction of the propagator for the magnetisation. The trajectories of the pseudoclassical model also provide some insight into the nature of the end-points.Comment: 25 page

Boundary-Induced Pattern Formation from Temporal Oscillation: Spatial Map Analysis

Boundary-induced pattern formation from a spatially uniform state is investigated using one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations. The temporal oscillation is successively transformed into a spatially periodic pattern, triggered by diffusion from the fixed boundary. We introduced a spatial map, whose temporal sequence, under selection criteria from multiple stationary solutions, can completely reproduce the emergent pattern, by replacing the time with space. The relationship of the pattern wavelength with the period of oscillation is also obtained. The generality of the pattern selection process and algorithm is discussed with possible relevance to biological morphogenesis.Comment: 17page