IUBio

Interneurons

Karla Parussel kparussel at axcess.co.uk
Fri Mar 19 06:56:27 EST 1999


Hi!

First off, sorry if this is obvious, in the FAQ (is there one), an
extremely ignorant question
or just not relevant (comp.ai.neural-net couldnt really help). I am not
actually trained in biology or neuroscience, my path has been more a :

Computer Science -> Artificial Life -> interest in Computational
Neuroscience

Anyway. I have implemented a 'biologically plausible' neural tool kit.
(I get bored in the evenings you see). These are basically spiky,
integrate and fire, threshold neurons that leak their charge. I have
been reading a lot of literature from a lot of places and this is the
end result. Even though it now does pavolvian conditioning perfectly, I
can't use it to implement competition (where a group of neurons will try
to inhibit the other neurons while exciting themselves).

Anyway, what has started to become apparent is that I don't actually
have any
interneurons. Ooops. I know that they come in all shapes and sizes (like
neurons generally
do) and that the difference between interneurons (Golgi type II) and
principle neurons (Golgi type I)  is that the interneurons connect to
outside the immediate area / cluster / whatever whereas principle
neurons do. But is there any other difference? Someone on
comp.ai.neural-nets said that the not all neurons intergrate, reach a
threshold and fire. Would some just propagate any charge they received
from the synapses on their dendrites immediately to their axon for
example?

Would this be relevant to inhibitory interneurons that are said to be
found quite a lot in competitive networks? I have looked all over the
place, searched the net and read through my books but I just can't seem
to find the answers. My maths isn't really that strong which probably
limits me a lot when it comes to understanding large mathematical
formuli. If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be
really appreciative.

Anyway, sorry if this is completely off-topic etc etc I havn't really
seen any other posts like this here but I am not sure where else to ask.



Thanks :)

Karla




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