The membrane potential process of a single neuron seen as a cumulative damage process.

A simple integrate-and-fire mechanism of a single neuron can be compared with a cumulative damage process, where the spiking process is analogous to rupture sequences of a material under cycles of stress. Although in some cases lognormal-like patterns can be recognized in the inter-spike times under a simple integrate-and-fire mechanism, fatigue life models as the inverse Gaussian distribution and the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution (which was recently introduced in the neural activity framework) provide theoretical arguments that make them more suitable for the modeling of the resulting inter-spike times.