Firing synchrony among neurons is thought to play functional roles in several brain regions. In theoretical analyses, firing synchrony among neurons within sub-millisecond precision is feasible to convey information. However, little is known about the occurrence and the functional significance of the sub-millisecond synchrony among closely neighboring neurons in the brain of behaving animals be...

To examine the mechanisms underlying milk-ejection bursts of oxytocin (OT) neurons during suckling, both in vivo and in vitro studies were performed on supraoptic OT neurons from lactating rats. The bursts were first recorded extracellularly in anesthetized rats. Burst-related electrical parameters were essentially the same as previous reports except for a trend toward transient decreases in ba...

Recent reports show that synaptic inhibition can modulate postsynaptic spike timing without having strong effects on firing rate. Thus synaptic inhibition can achieve multiplicity in neural circuit operation through variable modulation of postsynaptic firing rate vs. timing. We tested this possibility for recurrent inhibition (RI) of spinal motoneurons. In in vivo electrophysiological studies o...

Recent evidence suggests that low and high firing neurons display different plasticity and dynamics. We therefore investigated the effects of sleep and waking states and state transitions on hippocampal CA1 neurons with a log-normal distribution of firing rates. We analyzed single unit spiking from 1017 putative pyramidal cells and 116 putative interneurons along with local field potentials of ...

Working memory is an emergent property of neuronal networks, but its cellular basis remains elusive. Recent data show that principal neurons of the entorhinal cortex display persistent firing at graded firing rates that can be shifted up or down in response to brief excitatory or inhibitory stimuli. Here, we present a model of a potential mechanism for graded firing. Our multicompartmental mode...

Pairwise correlations among spike trains recorded in vivo have been frequently reported. It has been argued that correlated activity could play an important role in the brain, because it efficiently modulates the response of a postsynaptic neuron. We show here that a neuron's output firing rate critically depends on the higher-order statistics of the input ensemble. We constructed two statistic...