Dendritic spikes are local events that occasionally propagate successfully to the soma, triggering axonal action potentials that backpropagate into the dendrites. In this issue of Neuron, Remy et al. show that single dendritic spikes in hippocampal pyramidal neurons transiently inhibit further dendritic spikes in the same branch, while backpropagating action potentials trigger a widespread redu...

We consider extended variants of spiking neural P systems with decaying spikes (i.e., the spikes have a limited lifetime) and/or total spiking (i.e., the whole contents of a neuron is erased when it spikes). Although we use the extended model of spiking neural P systems, these restrictions of decaying spikes and/or total spiking do not allow for the generation or the acceptance of more than reg...

EEGs were recorded in 86 autistic patients during sleep. Epileptic discharges were observed in 37 cases (43%). Twenty-seven (73%) of these 37 cases had localized spikes, 8 had multiple spike foci, one had generalized spikes, and one had both multiple spike foci and generalized spikes. Forty-seven epileptic discharge foci were registered in 36 cases, the exception being one with generalized spik...

We performed experiments in the cat geniculocortical pathway, in vivo, to examine how presynaptic spikes interact to influence the firing of postsynaptic targets. In particular, we asked (1) how do multiple spikes from a single presynaptic neuron interact to influence the firing of a postsynaptic target (homosynaptic interactions), (2) how do spikes from two different presynaptic neurons intera...

A frightening thought for a computer scientist is that there might be completely different ways of designing computing machinery, that we may miss by focusing on incremental improvements of current designs. In fact, we know that there exist much better design strategies, since the human brain has information processing capabilities that are in many aspects superior to our current computers. Fur...

During periods of market stress, electricity prices can rise dramatically. Electricity retailers cannot pass these extreme prices on to customers because of retail price regulation. Improved prediction of these price spikes, therefore, is important for risk management. This paper builds a time-varying-probability Markov-switching model of Queensland electricity prices, aimed particularly at for...

In order to make progress toward understanding the sensory coding strategies employed by the cortex, it will be necessary to draw upon guiding principles that provide us with reasonable ideas for what to expect and what to look for in the neural circuitry. The unifying theme behind all of the chapters in this book is that probabilistic inference—i.e., the process of inferring the state of the w...

The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) and the adjacent parasubiculum are known for their elaborate spatial discharges (grid cells, border cells, etc.) and the precessing of spikes relative to the local field potential. We know little, however, about how spatio-temporal firing patterns map onto cell types. We find that cell type is a major determinant of spatio-temporal discharge properties. Parasu...

Methods for rapid and objective quantification of interictal spikes in raw, unprocessed electroencephalogram (EEG) samples are scarce. We evaluated the accuracy of a tailored automated spike quantification algorithm. The automated quantification was compared with the quantification by two board-certified clinical neurophysiologists (gold-standard) in five steps: 1) accuracy in a single EEG chan...

We apply the dressing method to a string solution given by a static string wrapped around the equator of a three-sphere and find that the result is the single spike solution recently discussed in the literature. Further application of the method allows the construction of solutions with multiple spikes. In particular we construct the solution describing the scattering of two single spikes and c...