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Is there signal in the noise?

A study now shows that variability in neuronal responses in the visual system mainly arises from slow fluctuations in excitability, presumably caused by factors of nonsensory origin, such as arousal, attention or anesthesia.

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Figure 1: The modulated Poisson model and the law of total variance.

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Correspondence to Alexander S Ecker or Andreas S Tolias.

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Ecker, A., Tolias, A. Is there signal in the noise?. Nat Neurosci 17, 750–751 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3722

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