Charge stored on a neuron per spike

Hello nengo_dl community,

I hope you are doing well.

I am working with MNIST tutorial on nengo_dl and I would like to know:
how can I find the amount of charge that is stored on a neuron when it receives one spike?

Thank you for your answer in advance.

Hi @Choozi,

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “amount of charge stored on a neuron”. Do you mean the neuron membrane potential? If that’s the case, you should be able to get that by probing the neuron’s voltage. I haven’t actually tested it in a NengoDL model, but you should be able to use the output of the probe like other Nengo probes (see this example).

@xchoo Thank you for your prompt reply. I apologize I have not explained my question well. What I mean was looking at it from a hardware perspective. For example, if I am representing my spike as a charge stored on a capacitor then how much charge it would store on a capacitor for a single spike? Do I explain my question enough?

Nengo and NengoDL are software neural simulators that are disconnected from the hardware that run the simulations. If you want to find the “charge” per spike, you’ll need to consult the documentation for whatever hardware you are using to run the Nengo model. If you are running it on the Loihi hardware (for example), you’ll need to ask the Intel developers for the information you are looking for.

@xchoo ok, got it. Thank you for your answer. :slight_smile: