Transfer Characteristics of Dispersive Nerve Bundles

It is well known that the propagation velocities of the fibers in peripheral nerve bundles are distributed over a considerable range. The fastest fibers subserving a particular end organ may have conduction velocities four or five times greater than the slowest fibers subserving that end organ. Since the fibers for a particular end organ are of nearly equal length, this velocity dispersion causes a latency dispersion or desynchronization of neural signals traveling along the nerve bundle. The most outstanding effect of dispersion is a low-pass filter effect. Nulls and peaks in the transfer function may also occur as a result Of sharp truncation of a distribution or multimoded distributions of conduction velocities.