What is the volley principle?

Answer 1

The Volley Principle is an information encoding scheme used in human hearing. Nerve cells transmit information by generating brief electrical pulses called action potentials. Sound is encoded by producing an action potential for each cycle of the vibration, eg. 200Hz results in a neuron producing 200 action potentials per second. BUT, neurons can only produce action potentials around 300 to 500 Hz. The human ear overcomes this problem by allowing several nerve cells to take turns performing this single task. The volley principle was proposed to deal with this apparent anomaly between the behaviour of single neurons and groups of neurons.