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What causes a neuron to spike?

Erik Cook

Physiology, McGill

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Most of our brain鈥檚 neurons communicate using action potentials (referred to as spikes). When a neuron generates a spike, what does that spike tell us about the synaptic inputs the neuron received in its dendrites? The answer to this fundamental question is not as straightforward as it might seem despite many years of pioneering work. In this seminar I will present new experimental and modeling work on cortical pyramidal neurons that reveals they have two dendrite-to-soma transfer functions: a slow integrating sub-threshold transfer function and a much faster spike-generating transfer function. These two transfer function arise from the nonlinear properties of dendrites that are much faster than the integrative properties of the soma. Thus, neurons seem to preferentially extract fast dendritic inputs, that in turn, generate somatic spikes.