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A dendritic spine is a very small structure (~0.1 {\mu}m$^3$) of a neuron that processes input timing information. Why are spines so small? Here, we provide functional reasons; the size of spines is optimal for information coding. Spines…
Noise is an inherent part of neuronal dynamics, and thus of the brain. It can be observed in neuronal activity at different spatiotemporal scales, including in neuronal membrane potentials, local field potentials, electroencephalography,…
Neurons in the central nervous system are affected by complex and noisy signals due to fluctuations in their cellular environment and in the inputs they receive from many other cells 1,2. Such noise usually increases the probability that a…
Short-term changes in efficacy have been postulated to enhance the ability of synapses to transmit information between neurons, and within neuronal networks. Even at the level of connections between single neurons, direct confirmation of…
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…
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 --…
Nature presents multiple intriguing examples of processes which proceed at high precision and regularity. This remarkable stability is frequently counter to modelers' experience with the inherent stochasticity of chemical reactions in the…
We theoretically describe how weak signals may be efficiently transmitted throughout more than one frequency range in noisy excitable media by kind of stochastic multiresonance. This serves us here to reinterpret recent experiments in…
Varied sensory systems use noise in order to enhance detection of weak signals. It has been conjectured in the literature that this effect, known as stochastic resonance, may take place in central cognitive processes such as the memory…
Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that…
Fluctuations in intracellular reactions (intrinsic noise) reduce the information transmitted from an extracellular input to a cellular response. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the decrease in the transmitted information with…
Synaptic connections between neurons in the brain are dynamic because of continuously ongoing spine dynamics, axonal sprouting, and other processes. In fact, it was recently shown that the spontaneous synapse-autonomous component of spine…
Sensory neurons give highly variable responses to stimulation, which can limit the amount of stimulus information available to downstream circuits. Much work has investigated the factors that affect the amount of information encoded in…
Biological neurons receive multiple noisy oscillatory signals, and their dynamical response to the superposition of these signals is of fundamental importance for information processing in the brain. Here we study the response of neural…
Short-term memory in the brain cannot in general be explained the way long-term memory can -- as a gradual modification of synaptic weights -- since it takes place too quickly. Theories based on some form of cellular bistability, however,…
Stochastic resonance is a non-linear phenomenon, in which the sensitivity of signal detectors can be enhanced by adding random noise to the detector input. Here, we demonstrate that noise can also improve the information flux in recurrent…
Neuronal membrane potentials fluctuate stochastically due to conductance changes caused by random transitions between the open and close states of ion channels. Although it has previously been shown that channel noise can nontrivially…
Synaptic efficacy between neurons is known to change within a short time scale dynamically. Neurophysiological experiments show that high-frequency presynaptic inputs decrease synaptic efficacy between neurons. This phenomenon is called…
Neural oscillations are universal phenomena and can be observed at different levels of neural systems, from single neuron to macroscopic brain. The frequency of those oscillations are related to the brain functions. However, little is know…
Neural networks encode information through their collective spiking activity in response to external stimuli. This population response is noisy and strongly correlated, with complex interplay between correlations induced by the stimulus,…