SCT: Noise Canceling Technology Found in Fish

The ability to ignore self-
generated noise is logical
but requires engineering

Reprinted from Science & Culture Today.

Noise Cancellation: A Remarkable Design Solution in Biology
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, August 21, 2023

Snakes should be immune to their own poison. Electric eels should not shock themselves. And protection from self-generated noise requires a preplanned noise cancellation system.

In a Dispatch in Current Biology, Leonard Maier discussed a biological requirement many don’t think much about: how to ignore your own noise. Eliminating self-generated noise, he says, is accomplished by “Active Sensing.”

Animals use active sensing to investigate their environment. The active sense inputs must be discriminated from those arising independently from environmental signals. An experimental and modelling study has revealed how precise control of dendritic spike backpropagation contributes to such discrimination. [Emphasis added.]

The study referenced by Maier was published in Current Biology by Muller, Abbott, and Sawtelle. It involves some heavy reading in neuroscience, but the basic idea is easy to understand. If you’re trying to listen to something while making loud noises yourself, you need a way to subtract your own noise.

Biological noise cancellation works at the neuron level. The basic idea of “spike backpropagation” is that the receiving neuron sends precisely controlled signals to the sending neuron with an “image” (so to speak) of its own noise profile. This negative image cancels the noise part of the complete signal, eliminating self-generated noise from the received signal, so that the brain receives only the environmental signal….

Click here to continue reading.