Related papers: Cellular Adaptation Accounts for the Sparse and Re…

The dynamic range of stimulus processing in living organisms is much larger than a single neural network can explain. For a generic, tunable spiking network we derive that while the dynamic range is maximal at criticality, the interval of…

Being permanently confronted with an uncertain world, brains have faced evolutionary pressure to represent this uncertainty in order to respond appropriately. Often, this requires visiting multiple interpretations of the available…

Sequences of events in noise-driven excitable systems with slow variables often show serial correlations among their intervals of events. Here, we employ a master equation for general non-renewal processes to calculate the interval and…

Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…

Visual recognition takes a small fraction of a second and relies on the cascade of signals along the ventral visual stream. Given the rapid path through multiple processing steps between photoreceptors and higher visual areas, information…

The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascade, an evolutionarily conserved motif present in all eukaryotic cells, is involved in coordinating critical cell-fate decisions, regulating protein synthesis, and mediating learning…

Neural noise sets a limit to information transmission in sensory systems. In several areas, the spiking response (to a repeated stimulus) has shown a higher degree of regularity than predicted by a Poisson process. However, a simple model…

In this paper we present a simple microscopic stochastic model describing short term plasticity within a large homogeneous network of interacting neurons. Each neuron is represented by its membrane potential and by the residual calcium…

This paper proposes a neuronal circuitry layout and synaptic plasticity principles that allow the (pyramidal) neuron to act as a "combinatorial switch". Namely, the neuron learns to be more prone to generate spikes given those combinations…

Spike synchrony, which occurs in various cortical areas in response to specific perception, action and memory tasks, has sparked a long-standing debate on the nature of temporal organization in cortex. One prominent view is that this type…

Mitral cells of the olfactory bulb form sparse representations of the odorants and transmit this information to the cortex. The olfactory code carried by the mitral cells is sparser than the inputs that they receive. In this study we…

A common approach to interpreting spiking activity is based on identifying the firing fields---regions in physical or configuration spaces that elicit responses of neurons. Common examples include hippocampal place cells that fire at…

How can a microorganism adapt to a variety of environmental conditions despite there exists a limited number of signal transduction machineries? We show that for any growing cells whose gene expression is under stochastic fluctuations,…

Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…

Cortical neurons include many sub-cellular processes, operating at multiple timescales, which may affect their response to stimulation through non-linear and stochastic interaction with ion channels and ionic concentrations. Since new…

We investigate the efficient transmission and processing of weak, subthreshold signals in a realistic neural medium in the presence of different levels of the underlying noise. Assuming Hebbian weights for maximal synaptic conductances --…

Brains can process sensory information from different modalities at astonishing speed; this is surprising as the integration of inputs through the membrane of each individual neuron already causes a delayed response. Neuronal recordings…

We examine how the prior probability distribution of a sensory variable in the environment influences the optimal allocation of neurons and spikes in a population that represents that variable. We start with a conventional response model,…

We have developed a sparse mathematical representation of speech that minimizes the number of active model neurons needed to represent typical speech sounds. The model learns several well-known acoustic features of speech such as harmonic…

In the past decade, the cell-type specific connectivity and activity of local cortical networks have been characterized experimentally to some detail. In parallel, modeling has been established as a tool to relate network structure to…