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Sound grounds for computing dendrites

Nature volume 393, pages 207–208 (1998)Cite this article

Dendrites are projections that typically originate from the cell body of neurons and are the main site for incoming synaptic inputs. Their function is largely unknown. But there is now clear-cut evidence that, in the auditory brain stem, dendrites enrich the computational power of neurons.

But not much is known about what dendrites actually do. Are they just to enable the connection of synaptic inputs, or simply the result of structural constraints? Are they mere chemical compartments in which very local changes in the efficiency of synapses take place? Or might dendrites also carry out some specific computation that would otherwise be hard, or less efficient, to perform — in short, can dendrites enrich the computational power of neurons? On page 268of this issue3, Agmon-Snir et al. show that they can indeed. Using the rare example of the dendrites of coincidence detector (CD) cells in the auditory brain stem, they show that, together with their synaptic architecture, these dendrites are designed for improving sound localization.

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Figure 1: Dendrite variety.
Figure 2: How the bipolar dendrites of coincidence detection neurons, and the mapping of synaptic inputs from each ear to different dendrites, improve sound localization.

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  1. The Department of Neurobiology and the Center for Neural Computation, Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, 91904, Jerusalem, Israel

    Idan Segev

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  1. Idan Segev
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Segev, I. Sound grounds for computing dendrites. Nature 393, 207–208 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/30340

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