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The role of single neurons in information processing

Abstract

Neurons carry out the many operations that extract meaningful information from sensory receptor arrays at the organism's periphery and translate these into action, imagery and memory. Within today's dominant computational paradigm, these operations, involving synapses, membrane ionic channels and changes in membrane potential, are thought of as steps in an algorithm or as computations. The role of neurons in these computations has evolved conceptually from that of a simple integrator of synaptic inputs until a threshold is reached and an output pulse is initiated, to a much more sophisticated processor with mixed analog-digital logic and highly adaptive synaptic elements.

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Figure 1: Simple neuronal models.
Figure 2: Dendritic trees exist in many shapes and sizes.
Figure 3: Dendritic and axonal action potentials in a cortical pyramidal cell.

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Acknowledgements

Work in the laboratories of the authors is supported by the NSF/ERC program, NIMH, ONR, Israeli Science Foundation and the BSF. We thank R. Nitzan for Fig. 2a, Y. Manor for Fig. 2b, J. Andersen for the two pyramidal cells in Fig. 2c and d, M. Rapp for Fig. 2e, B. Burke for Fig. 2f, M. Larkum for Fig. 3, F. Gabbiani for Fig. 4 and F. Gabbiani and G. Kreiman for comments.

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Correspondence to Christof Koch.

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Koch, C., Segev, I. The role of single neurons in information processing. Nat Neurosci 3 (Suppl 11), 1171–1177 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/81444

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