Show Notes
The idea that memories are stored in molecules was popular in the middle of the 20th century. However, since the discovery of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the 1970s, the dominant view has been that our memories are stored in synapses, that is, in the connections between neurons. Today, there are signs that the interest in molecular memory is returning, and the guest has presented a theory suggesting that molecular and synaptic memory might serve complementary needs for animals.
More from Theoretical Neuroscience Podcast
For neurons to function, the appropriate ion-channel proteins must be present where they are needed, including in distal dendrites and axon terminals. This requires energy, and the guest's group has developed a mechanistic mathematical model to investigate how neurons can reduce this cost by optimizing where proteins are synthesized within the cell—locally or at more distant sites. The model's predictions agree with experimental findings, suggesting that energy optimization is a fundamental operating principle of neurons.
The prominent and colorful neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg was born 100 years ago. He co-founded the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen in Germany, where he made seminal contributions to neuroanatomy, synthetic psychology, and theories for cerebellar, fly vision and cortical function. He was celebrated at the recent Braitenberg*100 symposium which I attended together with today's guest. Ad Aertsen is an outstanding computational neuroscientist and worked with Braitenberg back in the days.
A bursting neuron can maintain its firing-pattern identity throughout an animal's life, even though the ion-channel proteins underlying this identity are turned over on the timescale of days.
Most neural network models till date have assumed all neurons to be identical, or at least that all neurons within a population are identical. In reality, no two neurons are completely the same. Is this due to unavoidable "biological noise" that the nervous system has to cope with, or can it be a useful feature included by design? The guest co-wrote the recent paper "How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain" addressing this question.