Multistable firing patterns among several neurons.

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Abstract
During flight, the different units of a single muscle of the flight motor system of the blowfly, Calliphora vomitorla, receive spikes in a sequential order which is repeated cyclically. The units fire not with a fixed time delay between them, but at fixed fractions of the repeating cycle (at fixed phase), independently of the cycle length. Several times in the course of a long flight a unit changes Us preferred phase so that a new sequence occurs; in fact all possible permutations of the sequence occur. However, the relative timings of the spikes in the different sequences do not form a continuum; instead certain phases are much preferred by each unit. Frequency and phase control are independent, e.g., the phase position maintained by a unit is independent of the frequency of the units. Thus this group of motor neurons has only a few stable output patterns corresponding to the different possible combinations of the preferred phase positions of the several units. This phenomenon is termed phase multistability.

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