Combining engineering models with biophysical models to analyze a biological neural network: the electrosensory system of sharks, skates and rays

The elasmobranch electrosensory system forms a neural representation of weak electrical field sources in the environment. Electrical noise correlated to the animal´s own activity is rejected at an early stage of processing in the brain. The noise rejecting mechanism appears to be a neural analog of an adaptive array filter in the dorsal octavolateral nucleus of the medulla. The authors have applied engineering analysis to build a framework for understanding how the shark´s brain may transform electrosensory data into a representation of its environment. They are fleshing out the skeleton by replacing analytical terms in the engineering model with neural network models based on biological data