Effects of Neuronal Noise on Neural Communication

In this work, we propose an approach to better understand the effects of neuronal noise on neural communication systems. Here, we extend the fundamental Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model by adding synaptic couplings to represent the statistical dependencies among different neurons under the effect of additional noise. We estimate directional information-theoretic quantities, such as the Transfer Entropy (TE), to infer the couplings between neurons under the effect of different noise levels. Based on our computational simulations, we demonstrate that these nonlinear systems can behave beyond our predictions and TE is an ideal tool to extract such dependencies from data.