Spiking neural P systems with myelin and dendritic spines

Abstract

Inspired by the dendritic and axonal morphology, some authors modeled the transmission speed of action potentials through of fixed dendritic and axonal delays, respectively. However, in practice, the exploration of dendrites and axons with variable delays potentially allows the improvement of advanced engineering applications. Taking inspiration from the structure of the dendritic spines and the process of myelination of axons, we introduce a new variant of the spiking neural P systems with variable axonal and dendritic delays named as a spiking neural P system with myelin and dendritic spines computation (MDSCSN P system). The inclusion of these experimentally proven biological features of axon and dendrites into standard spiking neural P systems allows to control the timing of dendritic/axonal transmissions. As a consequence, the soma processing of neurons is significantly reduced since it receives stable firing patterns. In contrast, standard spiking neural P systems and their recent variants use a large number of neurons/synapses to do the same. To demonstrate this, we generate a small universal SN P system by employing only neurons with standard rules to perform any Turing computable function and to figure out the Subset Sum problem in the uniform way.