ROCK'N'ROLL ALIENS

摘要

Elucidating the principles by which neurons and neuronal circuits 'compute' remains a cardinal objective in neuroscience. Through an ingenious set of experiments, Person and Raman1 describe one such computational principle: how a (nuclear) neuron decodes the temporal structure of its synchronous (Purkinje cell) inhibitory inputs while ignoring the asynchronous ones. The question is how relevant this temporal decoding mechanism is to cerebellar processing.rnPerson and Raman demonstrate in vitro that synchronous activity of even two Purkinje-cell inputs is sufficient to modestly entrain (time-lock) the activity of their target nuclear neuron. They posit that temporal decoding is the mechanism by which nuclear neurons encode information in vivo.