Related papers: An Operating Principle of the Cerebral Cortex, and…

The brain can efficiently learn a wide range of tasks, motivating the search for biologically inspired learning rules for improving current artificial intelligence technology. Most biological models are composed of point neurons, and cannot…

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…

The brain can learn to solve a wide range of tasks with high temporal and energetic efficiency. However, most biological models are composed of simple single compartment neurons and cannot achieve the state-of-art performances of artificial…

Cortical pyramidal neurons have a complex dendritic anatomy, whose function is an active research field. In particular, the segregation between its soma and the apical dendritic tree is believed to play an active role in processing…

Animal behaviour depends on learning to associate sensory stimuli with the desired motor command. Understanding how the brain orchestrates the necessary synaptic modifications across different brain areas has remained a longstanding puzzle.…

Neocortical neurons have thousands of excitatory synapses. It is a mystery how neurons integrate the input from so many synapses and what kind of large-scale network behavior this enables. It has been previously proposed that non-linear…

One of the hallmark features of neocortical anatomy is the presence of extensive top-down projections into primary sensory areas, with many impinging on the distal apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons. While it is known that they exert a…

Mounting experimental evidence suggests that brain-state-specific neural mechanisms, supported by connectomic architectures, play a crucial role in integrating past and contextual knowledge with the current, incoming flow of evidence (e.g.,…

The brain is likely the most complex organ, given the variety of functions it controls, the number of cells it comprises, and their corresponding diversity. Studying and identifying neurons, the brain's primary building blocks, is a crucial…

Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…

Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…

This paper presents a spike-based model which employs neurons with functionally distinct dendritic compartments for classifying high dimensional binary patterns. The synaptic inputs arriving on each dendritic subunit are nonlinearly…

A popular theory of perceptual processing holds that the brain learns both a generative model of the world and a paired recognition model using variational Bayesian inference. Most hypotheses of how the brain might learn these models assume…

Animals learn to predict external contingencies from experience through a process of conditioning. A natural mechanism for conditioning is stimulus substitution, whereby the neuronal response to a stimulus with no prior behavioral…

A fundamental function of cortical circuits is the integration of information from different sources to form a reliable basis for behavior. While animals behave as if they optimally integrate information according to Bayesian probability…

Neocortical pyramidal neurons have many dendrites, and such dendrites are capable of, in isolation of one-another, generating a neuronal spike. It is also now understood that there is a large amount of dendritic growth during the first…

A complete single-neuron model must correctly reproduce the firing of spikes and bursts. We present a study of a simplified model of deep pyramidal cells of the cortex with active dendrites. We hypothesized that we can model the soma and…

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…

A population of neurons typically exhibits a broad diversity of responses to sensory inputs. The intuitive notion of functional classification is that cells can be clustered so that most of the diversity is captured in the identity of the…

Various classes of neurons alternate between high-frequency discharges and silent intervals. This phenomenon is called burst firing. To analyze burst activity in an insect system, grasshopper auditory receptor neurons were recorded in vivo…