An important discovery that has come out of computational neuroscience, is that cortical neurons in vivo appear to receive so-called balanced inputs.
In the balanced state the excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs to a neuron are about equal, and action potentials occur when a fluctuation temporarily makes the excitation dominate.
The theory, for example, explains the observed irregular firing of cortical neurons in the background state.
Today’s guest was one of the key developers of the theory in the late 1990s.
Links:
- Amit & Brunel: “Model of global spontaneous activity and local structured activity during delay periods in the cerebral cortex”, Cerebral Cortex (1997)
- Amit & Brunel: “Dynamics of a recurrent network of spiking neurons before and following learning”, Network: Computation in Neural Systems (1997)
- Brunel & Hakim: “Fast Global Oscillations in Networks of Integrate-and-Fire Neurons with Low Firing Rates”, Neural Computation Computation (1999)
- Brunel: “Dynamics of Sparsely Connected Networks of Excitatory and Inhibitory Spiking Neurons”, Journal of Computational Neuroscience (2000)
- Homepage of Nicolas Brunel
The podcast was recorded on October 13th, 2025 and lasts 1 hour and 38 minutes.
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