Spontaneous and sound-evoked single-unit activity was recorded from afferent neurones in
the cochlear ganglion of the anaesthetized pigeon. The histogram of successive intervals of
spontaneous activity of 51% of neurones exhibited more short intervals than expected from a
Poisson point-process description of spike times; for another 43% of neurones the point-
process was Poisson. A model of spike generation was developed to account for the
concentration of short spike-intervals. The proposed model contains inhibitory postsynaptic …