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Strength in more than numbers

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 614–616 (2015)Cite this article

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Theory suggests that cerebellar granule cells combine sensory and motor signals originating from different sources. An unexpected logic governing how granule cells process different input sources may enhance computational power.

Cerebellar researchers may be closing in on the function of a large population of neurons in the brain: the tiny granule cells at the input stage of the cerebellar cortex. These are by far the most numerous vertebrate neurons, estimated to account for more than three-quarters of the 80 billion neurons in the human brain1. In the early 1970s, David Marr2 and James Albus3 developed compelling theoretical accounts to explain why so many granule cells would be useful. However, because of the technical difficulties involved in recording from these small, densely packed neurons in vivo, experimental tests of these theories have only recently become possible4,5. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Chabrol et al.6 provide evidence for unsuspected order among the diversity of input filtering properties of mossy fiber synapses onto granule cells. Paradoxically, this order may act to enhance the random mixing of signals proposed by the theory.

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Figure 1: Presynaptic origins of diverse granule cell responses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nathaniel B. Sawtell and L.F. Abbott are in the Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.,

    Nathaniel B Sawtell & L F Abbott

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  1. Nathaniel B Sawtell
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  2. L F Abbott
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Correspondence to Nathaniel B Sawtell.

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Sawtell, N., Abbott, L. Strength in more than numbers. Nat Neurosci 18, 614–616 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4006

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