Fig. 9. Reducing energy consumption with distributed coding in spiking neurons. The energy requirements for encoding 1 of 100 conditions initially decrease but subsequently increase as the number of active neurons increases (for cells signalling with spike rates below 60 Hz). As the spike rate increases the region of the parameter space in which distributed coding is advantageous becomes smaller. Adapted from Attwell and Laughlin (Attwell and Laughlin, 2001).