Finding the Key to a Synapse

T. Natschlaeger and W. Maass

Abstract:

Experimental data have shown that synapses are heterogeneous: different synapses respond with different sequences of amplitudes of postsynaptic responses to the same presynaptic spike train. Neither the role of synaptic dynamics itself nor the role of the heterogeneity of synaptic dynamics for computations in neural circuits is well understood. We present in this article methods that make it feasible to compute for a given synapse with known synaptic parameters the spike train that is optimally fitted to the synapse, in the sense that it produces the largest sum of postsynaptic responses. To our surprise we find that most of these optimally fitted spike trains match common firing patterns of specific types of neurons that are discussed in the literature. Hence our analysis provides a possible functional explanation for the experimentally observed regularity in the combination of specific types of synapses with specific types of neurons in neural circuits.

Reference: T. Natschlaeger and W. Maass. Finding the key to a synapse. In T. K. Leen, T. G. Dietterich, and V. Tresp, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS '2000), volume 13, pages 138-144, Cambridge, 2001. MIT Press.