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why is this unexpected?

The usual story is that neuron were initially characterized experimentally using current injections to which their firing times are (in a certain sense) maximally disordered and thus the response is characterized only by firing rate.

This idea is also born out in most real neural systems, where firing rate is well correlated with various sorts of feature presentation.

But at faster timescales other things seem to be going on.

Interestingly enough, a sequence of maximally disordered bits (poisson distributed) is exactly what you would expect from a highly efficient code.

So either the brain is entirely random, or so exquisitely determined that we can’t possibly figure out its code from statistics on the bits alone. I put my bets on the latter.

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