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Volatile neurons unite to stabilize visual experience

It has been unclear how the brain creates stable visual experiences from the highly variable activity of individual neurons. Imaging from thousands of neurons across the entire mouse visual cortex provides an explanation.
  1. Tatiana Engel

    1. Tatiana Engel is at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA.

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Our senses provide us with a stable experience of the surrounding world. Whether you look at the family photo on your desk now, in an hour or next week, you’ll still see the same image. This perceptual stability is astonishing, given how variable neural activity is in the brain’s visual cortex. Single neurons respond with different strengths every time we look at the same image. Moreover, neurons change their sensitivity across days — so a neuron that reliably responds to an image today might be unresponsive tomorrow. Writing in Nature, Ebrahimi et al.1 provide an explanation for this apparent contradiction.

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Nature 605, 625-626 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01212-1

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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