Synaptic Input

In this handout, I consider membrane potential to be the key quantity. I take the point of view that action potentials are just a way of encoding (for transmission) the continuous membrane potential signals. In fact, the spike encoding/decoding process may perform important additional processing functions in some neural systems, but I ignore this possibility here. Instead I think of the neural membrane as the brain’s primary functional computing element, loosely analogous to a transistor in computer. By wiring transistors together in different ways, you can compute many different functions. Similarly, by using different combinations and spatial arrangements of synapses, a dendritic tree can compute many different functions.