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Effect of brief inhibitory volley upon human firing motoneurons (experiment and model)

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Abstract

We investigated the effect of reciprocal inhibition upon single firing motoneurons of the human soleus and ex. carpus uln. A computer simulation of the effect of an inhibitory volley upon motoneuron impulse activity was carried out on the basis of our own data and data in the literature [3, 4]. It was shown that the duration of the silent period (SP), i.e., the period of complete cessation of firing as revealed on the peristimulus histogram (PSH), can be altered under the influence of the following factors: mean frequency of background firing (inverse dependence); variance of interspike intervals (ISIs) of background firing (inverse dependence); duration of that portion of an ISI of motoneuron activity during which an inhibitory volley causes a prolongation of the ISI (d); the maximum prolongation of the ISI (δxmax). If δmax<d, the duration of the SP is similar to the duration of δxmax for the briefest ISI within the range of variability in background firing. If δxmax>d, the duration of the SP is similar to the duration d of the briefest ISI. To a significant degree, the parameters of the peristimulus histogram thus determine the frequency and variance of ISIs in the background firing and possibly also the individual tendency of the motoneuron to respond to an inhibitory volley by prolongation of the ISI.

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Authors
  1. M. Petrkevich
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  2. L. I. Churikova
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  3. R. S. Person
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Additional information

L. A. Orbeli Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering PAS, Warsaw (Republic of Poland), Institute for Problems of Information Transmission, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow. Translated from Neirofiziologiya, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 463–471, July–August, 1991.

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Petrkevich, M., Churikova, L.I. & Person, R.S. Effect of brief inhibitory volley upon human firing motoneurons (experiment and model). Neurophysiology 23, 341–348 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01052567

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01052567

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