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Published online 19 December 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.392
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The power of a single neuron
Stimulating one brain cell can be enough to change behaviour.
Stimulating just one neuron can be enough to affect learning and behaviour, researchers have found. The results, published this week by Nature,conflict with the long-held notion that many neurons — in the order of thousands — are required to generate a behavioural reaction.
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I would be interested to know if neuron size has an effect on a response to a stimulus applied to a single neuron. Similar experiments could be done on cephalopods or other animals with giant neurons to see if there is a correlation between neuron size and the response pathway. It would also be interesting to see if different stimuli applied to the same neuron elicite different levels or types of response.
Newsome et al got similar results in MT more than a decade ago, but perhaps things are "hotly debated" until no one can afford to use even more expensive techniques.