Spectral Analysis of Pulse Frequency Modulation in the Nervous Systems

Spectral analysis is one of the more important design and evaluation tools available to the communications engineer and it could also be a key to increased understanding of the nervous system. Some results of an analysis of the spectrum of the frequency modulated pulses of the nervous system show that 1) change in average pulse frequency is the likely information-carrying parameter of a neural pulse train, since distortion-free recovery of this variable is possible by simple low-pass filtering, and 2) phase relationships existing between signal components and distortion components of a neural pulse train imply unusual distortion attenuating properties of multiple or duplicate information channels. These results are discussed in light of some known nervous system structures.