Stochastic Resonance in crayfish hydrodynamic receptors stimulated with external noise

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Stochastic Resonance (SR) is a statistical process occurring only in nonlinear dynamical systems whereby a subthreshold coherent stimulus or signal can be enhanced by noise. The signal alone is too weak to cause a state change of the system. State changes are the carriers of information through the system. In the presence of random noise, however, the system can change state, more‐or‐less randomly, but with some degree of coherence with the signal. A measure of this coherence at the output shows a maximum at an optimal value of the noise intensity as the signature of SR. SR is the object of recent and continued experimental and theoretical research in statistical physics. While SR has been demonstrated in a variety of physical systems, it has not yet been discovered in any naturally occurring system. This paper was stimulated by the idea that the sensory nervous system might be an appropriate setting for a search for naturally occurring SR. The detection of weak stimuli, often in the presence of noise, is, after all, the first business of the sensory system. Moreover, the system is evolved, which admits the possibility that the process of natural selection might have resulted in an optimization with respect to the (inevitable) noise. This paper describes an experiment designed to observe SR in the mechanoreceptor cells of the crayfish Procambarus clarkii, shown on the left in Fig. 1, using external noise plus a weak coherent signal as the stimulus.