Noise Gated by Dendrosomatic Interactions Increases Information Transmission

Abstract

We study how noise in active dendrites affects information transmission. A mismatch of both noise and refractoriness between a dendritic compartment and a somatic compartment is shown to lead to an input-dependent exchange of leadership, where the dendrite entrains the soma for weak stimuli and the soma entrains the dendrite for strong stimuli. Using this simple mechanism, the noise in the dendritic compartment can boost weak signals without affecting the output of the neuron for strong stimuli. We show that these mechanisms give rise to a noise-induced increase of information transmission by neural populations.

Silences, spikes and bursts: Three‐part knot of the neural code

“…After years of research in neural coding, the field is converging to a combination of theory, observational experiments and perturbative ones (Panzeri et al., 2017). Theory provides plausible causal links stemming from either mechanistic or normative principles (Naud & Longtin, 2023), these theoretical insights are paired with observations of neuronal representation during both stimulation and behaviour forming a first line of enquiry. Perturbations are then required to attempt to infer the causal relationship between either stimulus, behaviour and neuronal representations.…”