  Optogenetics is an emerging field of neuroscience where neurons are
genetically modified to express light-sensitive receptors that enable external
control over when the neurons fire. Given the prominence of neuronal signaling
within the brain and throughout the body, optogenetics has significant
potential to improve the understanding of the nervous system and to develop
treatments for neurological diseases. This paper uses a simple optogenetic
model to compare the timing distortion between a randomly-generated target
spike sequence and an externally-stimulated neuron spike sequence. The
distortion is measured by filtering each sequence and finding the root mean
square error between the two filter outputs. The expected distortion is derived
in closed form when the target sequence generation rate is sufficiently low.
Derivations are verified via simulations.
