Neurons Tune Their Own Excitability When They Make A Decision
The brain is usually considered to be an extraordinarily complex object while a neuron is believed an ideal logical element. This idealization does not correspond to the real neural system properties. Experimental data give trustworthy evidence that a neuron is a microcosm of the brain. The firing threshold seems to be a dynamic property of an excitable membrane. Neurons appear to evaluate the most preferable consequence of their participation in the brain action, transiently change their excitability and only after that compare the magnitude of the input signal and threshold This suggests a novel approach to understanding the neurons role in controlling behavior. The model of a neuron has been developed on the basis of the supposed intracellular chemical reactions that are specific for a given input signal. The yield of chemical reactions was considered to affect the transition of sodium channels into an open state, as described in the Hodgkin-Huxley model, and to modulate neuronal excitability. However, for the given combination of inputs, the neuron model exhibits an all-or-none principle of spike generation when efficacy of the inputs changes. An increase in complexity of the neuronal model is more than compensated for by simplification of neural network tuning.
Lev Tsitolovsky
Department of Life Sciences,Bar-Ilan University,Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52900
国际会议
8th International Conference on Neural Information Processing(ICONIP 2001)(第八届国际神经信息处理大会)
上海
英文
41-46
2001-11-14（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）