2015
DOI: 10.7554/elife.10778
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Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity

Abstract: Information in a computer is quantified by the number of bits that can be stored and recovered. An important question about the brain is how much information can be stored at a synapse through synaptic plasticity, which depends on the history of probabilistic synaptic activity. The strong correlation between size and efficacy of a synapse allowed us to estimate the variability of synaptic plasticity. In an EM reconstruction of hippocampal neuropil we found single axons making two or more synaptic contacts onto… Show more

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Cited by 244 publications
(312 citation statements)
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“…Such numbers should of course be interpreted with extreme caution, but it is at least consistent that all these analyses, including the one performed here, cohere and suggest that the number of states of synaptic strength available to a synapse may be of order 10. A very recent study, based on a full reconstruction of a small volume of hippocampal neuropil, corroborates this order by finding evidence for 26 distinguishable synaptic strengths (Bartol et al, 2015).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 77%
“…Such numbers should of course be interpreted with extreme caution, but it is at least consistent that all these analyses, including the one performed here, cohere and suggest that the number of states of synaptic strength available to a synapse may be of order 10. A very recent study, based on a full reconstruction of a small volume of hippocampal neuropil, corroborates this order by finding evidence for 26 distinguishable synaptic strengths (Bartol et al, 2015).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 77%
“…The three-dimensional reconstructions were made from these sections [13]. The tissue analysed was from the middle of the stratum radiatum of hippocampal CA1 from three adult male rats (55-65 days old).…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…An important recent study [13] provided the first estimate of the number of stable states that could be encoded by synapse size. This study took advantage of the fact that some axons make two synapses onto the same target cell, synapses that are likely to have similar activity history.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…To put this in context, the capacity of the human brain has been estimated at 1 petabyte (10 15 )2 and thus to store this accumulation of data, 1 billion individuals would be required. Historically, the utilization of this data has been low but the future potential is well established 1.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%