Stochastic resonance (sensory neurobiology)

Stochastic resonance is a phenomenon that occurs in a threshold measurement system (e.g. a man-made instrument or device; a natural cell, organ or organism) when an appropriate measure of information transfer (signal-to-noise ratio, mutual information, coherence, d', etc.) is maximized in the presence of a non-zero level of stochastic input noise thereby lowering the response threshold; the system resonates at a particular noise level. Stochastic resonance is a phenomenon that occurs in a threshold measurement system (e.g. a man-made instrument or device; a natural cell, organ or organism) when an appropriate measure of information transfer (signal-to-noise ratio, mutual information, coherence, d', etc.) is maximized in the presence of a non-zero level of stochastic input noise thereby lowering the response threshold; the system resonates at a particular noise level. The three criteria that must be met for stochastic resonance to occur are: Stochastic resonance occurs when these conditions combine in such a way that a certain average noise intensity results in maximized information transfer. A time-averaged (or, equivalently, low-pass filtered) output due to signal of interest plus noise will yield an even better measurement of the signal compared to the system's response without noise in terms of SNR. The idea of adding noise to a system in order to improve the quality of measurements is counter-intuitive. Measurement systems are usually constructed or evolved to reduce noise as much as possible and thereby provide the most precise measurement of the signal of interest. Numerous experiments have demonstrated that, in both biological and non-biological systems, the addition of noise can actually improve the probability of detecting the signal; this is stochastic resonance. The systems in which stochastic resonance occur are always nonlinear systems. The addition of noise to a linear system will always decrease the information transfer rate. Stochastic resonance was first discovered in a study of the periodic recurrence of Earth's ice ages. The theory developed out of an effort to understand how the earth's climate oscillates periodically between two relatively stable global temperature states, one 'normal' and the other an 'ice age' state. The conventional explanation was that variations in the eccentricity of earth's orbital path occurred with a period of about 100,000 years and caused the average temperature to shift dramatically. The measured variation in the eccentricity had a relatively small amplitude compared to the dramatic temperature change, however, and stochastic resonance was developed to show that the temperature change due to the weak eccentricity oscillation and added stochastic variation due to the unpredictable energy output of the sun (known as the solar constant) could cause the temperature to move in a nonlinear fashion between two stable dynamic states. As an example of stochastic resonance, consider the following demonstration after Simonotto et al.