It has been argued by Eccles (Proc.R.Soc.Lon.B227,411-428(1986))
that only those 50 or so vesicles embedded in a paracrystalline
presynaptic vesicular grid constitute a bouton's firing zone.
(The remaining ones, ~10000 it is said, are loosely arranged in
the interior of the bouton and do not participate in the trans-
mission process from one neuron to another, Akert et al 1972,1975;
Triller & Korn,1982.)
Given this, how crystalline is the paracrystalline grid associated
with a bouton? Does it have both Bose and Fermi-like excitations
(allowing for quasiparticles via linear canonical transformations
of the Hamiltonian)? Someone's done any `field theory' related
work along these lines?
I know of J.D. Cowan's recent attempt at formulating a stochastic
neurodynamics, but it seems far too high-level to serve as a start-
ing point here (2-state and 3-state neurons, no vesicles, no grid).
More recent references would be highly appreciated.
Udo Merkel
Institut fuer Informatik
Stuttgart Univ.
--
merkel at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de