On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:45:07 +0000, "konstantin kouzovnikov"
<myukhome from hotmail.com> wrote:
>Dear r norman:
>>was enjoying your latest comments; would you help me with the following?
>>>There do exist groups who are very active in modeling true neuronal
>>activity, including local potentials,
>>I am interested in understanding some "local" mechanisms which do not rely
>on spikes, but on other mechanisms. Say, I am looking at a "chain" of groups
>of neurons which, as it was assumed, are organized within 100(mu)ml
>functionally, not structurally, self-organized clusters of rather otherwise
>undifferentiated mass of neural tissue; the task is to ID which cluster is
>active at the moment (among, say, 25 or so clusters); now, being absolutely
>out of my wits on that topic, would you recommend a group(s) or an
>individual(s) able to direct me to some reading material on the subject?
>
I don't really understand you about "functionally self-organized
clusters of rather otherwise undifferentiated mass of neural tissue".
In actual biological brains, there are distinct cells, not an
undifferentiated mass. There are dendrites that branch out perhaps
several hundred micrometers or more that do not ordinarily produce
action potentials. Yet, there are dendro-dendritic synapses and
microcircuits formed from these dendritic branches that generate
synaptic potentials that spread with decay (i.e., local and not action
potentials) to other synapses and stimulate the release of synaptic
transmitter there.
google "shepherd microcircuits" or see G Shepherd's book "Synaptic
Organization of the Brain." and C Koch's "Biophysics of Computation:
Information Processing in Single Neurons ".
Also try googling "dendritic circuits".
For some information about real neurons, as opposed to models, see
http://www.neurocomputing.org/RealNeurons.aspx
The classical biologically accurate neuron model is that of Duke
University at http://neuron.duke.edu/