![]() Thus we might use rates of firing of cortical neurons as a reasonable proxy for normal rates of neuron firing in the brain. It appears to hold at least a third of the brain’s synapses if not many more 5. It accounts for around 80% of the brain’s volume 3, and uses 44% of its energy 4. The neocortex is a large part of the brain. ![]() It seems unlikely that the average cortical neuron spikes much more than once per second. Estimates of rate of firing in human neocortexīased on the energy budget of the brain, it appears that the average cortical neuron fires around 0.16 times per second. 2 These sources lack references and are not very consistent, so we do not put much stock in them. Informal websites and articles commonly report neurons as firing between <1 and 200 times per second. This suggests that many estimates should be scaled down by around a factor of around ten. The size of the bias seems to be around a factor of ten: it appears that around 90% of neurons are ‘silent’, so unlikely to be detected in these kinds of experiments. 1 Preferentially recording more active neurons means overestimating average rates of firing. ![]() When researchers measure neural activity, they can fail to see neurons which rarely fire during the experiment (those with ‘sparse’ activity). Support Bias from neurons with sparse activity
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