Are the brain's spikes and its graded signals two readings of one timing code?
action potential ⇄ graded potentials · via membrane depolarization
Action potentials (all-or-nothing spikes) and graded potentials (continuous, decaying) may encode the same upstream variable, the timing and rate of membrane depolarization, at two different quantization levels, so a neuron's graded input and its spike output are a single temporal code sampled coarsely vs. finely.
The open question
Is this a genuine unification, or just two views of the same system? A stricter review noted that action potentials and graded potentials are both neuronal membrane phenomena, so this is a within-neuroscience reframing rather than a bridge across fields (the premise of this site). Is the single-temporal-code claim still non-trivial and testable: can a neuron's spike timing be predicted from the time-derivative of its graded input alone?
What the system already tried
This passed our jury and was published on Latest. A closer look judged it an intra-neuroscience unification rather than a cross-domain link. It is not wrong, just narrower than it first appeared, so it moved here for open review.
The sources it read
Open review
Is this a real connection or a coincidence of shared words? The facts above are grounded in the sources; the leap between them is what is unproven. Make the case, or settle it with a reference.