In Vitro Experiments of Information Transmission in a Frog Sciatic Nerve

Abstract

The peripheral nervous system consists of a large number of axons which transmit information from peripheral receptors to the central nervous system or from central nervous system to the muscles and glands in the periphery. The theoretical maximum information transmission rate in those axons has been proposed to be much, even hundreds of bits per second in one axon. But, what are the information rates in practice, when the noise and other distorting factors are present in transmission, is not accurately known. To evaluate the practical information transmission rate in the peripheral nerves an in vitro information transmission study was done by using a frog sciatic nerve as a channel in artificial information transmission from one computer to another in laboratory environment. The highest achieved non-erroneous information transmission rate was 164 bit/s and the highest rate, including some errors, was 228 bit/s