Stimulate the network

Stimulation devices (also called stimulators or generators) inject signals into a network. The most common devices for injecting analog signals (mostly currents) are:

The most commonly used generators for spike trains are:

Device properties

Each stimulation device stores the data it needs for generating the stimuli for connected nodes. Such data might be explicit lists of values, or parametric values as for instance amplitudes and frequencies.

As an alternative to storing device data directly, an external data source can be configured by setting the property stimulus_source to a specific recording backend. Such an external source could be another simulator, or a generic signal generator toolkit. The stimulation backend can be updated between each call to Run().

The format of the data that has to be received by NEST for updating the stimulation devices depends on the exact type of device. Please refer to the documentation of the device for details. Below is a list of available stimulation backends: