Through imaging and electrical recording, neuroscientists have learned a great deal about the anatomical and functional differences between different types of neurons in the brain’s cortex, but little is known about how they incorporate dendritic inputs and decide whether to fire an action potential. Large networks of these neurons communicate with each other to perform complex cognitive tasks such as producing speech. If stimulated enough, a neuron fires an action potential - an electrical impulse that spreads to other neurons. Graduate student Enrique Toloza and technical associate Norma Brown are also authors of the paper, which appears in Neuron on June 6.ĭendrites receive input from many other neurons and carry those signals to the cell body, also called the soma. “This is evidence that dendrites are actively engaged in producing and shaping the outputs of neurons.” “It’s really quite different than how the field had been thinking about this,” he says. The findings suggest that the role of dendrites in the brain’s computational ability is much larger than had previously been thought, says Mark Harnett, who is the Fred and Carole Middleton Career Development Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the paper. “All the neurons that we looked at had these dendritic spikes, and they had dendritic spikes very frequently.” They’re not a rare event,” says Lou Beaulieu-Laroche, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study. “It seems like dendritic spikes are an intrinsic feature of how neurons in our brain can compute information. Neuroscientists had previously suspected that dendrites might be active only rarely, under specific circumstances, but the MIT team found that dendrites are nearly always active when the main cell body of the neuron is active. According to a new study from MIT, they appear to play a surprisingly large role in neurons’ ability to translate incoming signals into electrical activity. Dendrites aren’t just passive information-carriers, however. Most neurons have many branching extensions called dendrites that receive input from thousands of other neurons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |